Verification of ArchiMate process specifications based on deductive temporal reasoning

Abstract

Abstract—Formal verification of business models has become recently an intensively researched area. Application of formal methods in this field necessities in overcoming several problems. Firstly, business analyst and designers rarely have enough skills and motivation to manually build abstract and formal specifica-tions, hence, it arises the need to provide tools for an automated translation of business models into a suitable form ready for formal verification. Moreover, notations and languages used to describe enterprises usually have no clear semantics. Finally, the verification itself must be supported by an efficient tool. In this paper we investigate an application of formal and deduction-based techniques to automated verification of behavioral de-scription embedded within ArchiMate models. We describe a set of rules that governs translation of processes specified in ArchiMate language into Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formulas. The translation step is achieved with the developed software, as a plugin into a popular the Archi modeler. Formal verification of a business process properties is achieved with another tool, the LTL prover based on the semantic tableaux technique. Application of the method is discussed on a small, yet illustrative, example of a taxi service. I.