Verifying Compliance of Business Processes with Temporal Answer Sets

In this paper we provide a framework for the specification and the verification of business processes, which is based on a temporal extension of answer set programming (ASP) and we address the problem of verifying the compliance of business processes to norms. The logical formalism we use, is a combination of Answer Set Programming and Dynamic Linear Time Temporal Logic (DLTL), and allows for a declarative specification of a business process, as well as the specification of norms, by means of a set of temporal rules and a set of temporal constraints. A notion of commitment, borrowed from the social approach to agent communication, is used to capture obligations within norms. Besides allowing for a declarative specification of business processes, the proposed framework can be used for encoding business processes specified in conventional workflow languages. The verification of temporal properties of a business process, expressed by temporal formulas, can be done by encoding bounded model checking techniques in ASP. Verifying compliance of a business process to norms consists, in particular, in verifying that there are no executions of the business process which leave commitments unfulfilled.