La vérification de patrons de workflow métier basés sur les flux de contrôle : une approche utilisant les systèmes à base de connaissances

摘要

This thesis tackles the problem of modelling semantically rich business workflow templates and proposes a process for developing workflow templates. The objective of the thesis is to transform a business process into a control flow-based business workflow template that guarantees syntactic and semantic validity. The main challenges are: (i) to define formalism for representing business processes; (ii) to establish automatic control mechanisms to ensure the correctness of a business workflow template based on a formal model and a set of semantic constraints; and (iii) to organize the knowledge base of workflow templates for a workflow development process. We propose a formalism which combines control flow (based on Coloured Petri Nets (CPNs)) with semantic constraints to represent business processes. The advantage of this formalism is that it allows not only syntactic checks based on the model of CPNs, but also semantic checks based on Semantic Web technologies. We start by designing an OWL ontology called the CPN ontology to represent the concepts of CPN-based business workflow templates. The design phase is followed by a thorough study of the properties of these templates in order to transform them into a set of axioms for the CPN ontology. In this formalism, a business process is syntactically transformed into an instance of the CPN ontology. Therefore, syntactic checking of a business process becomes simply verification by inference, by concepts and by axioms of the CPN ontology on the corresponding instance.