Validation of user intentions in process orchestration and choreography

Goal models and business process models are complementary artifacts for capturing the requirements and their execution flow in software engineering. In this case, goal models serve as input for designing business process models. This requires mappings between both types of models in order to describe which user goals are implemented by which activities in a business process. Due to the large number of possible relationships among goals in the goal model and possible control flows of activities, developers struggle with the challenge of maintaining consistent configurations of both models and their mappings. Managing these mappings manually is error-prone. In our work, we propose an automated solution that relies on Description Logics and automated reasoners for validating mappings that describe the realization of goals by activities in business process models. The results are the identification of two inconsistency patterns – orchestration inconsistency and choreography inconsistency – and the development of the corresponding algorithms for detecting these inconsistencies. & 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.