Analysis of business process specifications with OpenAltarica

The Business Process Model Annotation (BPMN) is a graphical notation aimed at building intuitive representations of complex business processes. Although a useful means for documenting of business processes the main limitation of BPMN is the lack of a formal semantics which may yield to ambiguous specifications, while leaving the modeller with no means to detect errors contained in a model. In this paper we introduce a framework for mapping BPMN models to a corresponding representation in terms of the Open-Altarica language, a formal modelling language designed for safety-analysis of discrete-event probabilistic models. This allows the BPMN modeller to take advantage of the analysis and simulation tools provided with the Open Altarica platform, therefore allowing for error detection in BPMN models. We demonstrate the proposed approach through the analysis of a power supply system case study.