Software and Symtem Modeling manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) A Model-driven method for enacting the design-time QoS analysis of Business Processes Paolo Bocciarelli · Andrea D’Ambrogio Received: date / Accepted: date Abstract Business Process Management (BPM) is a holistic approach for describing, analyzing, executing, managing and improving large enterprise business pro- cesses. A business process can be seen as a flow of tasks, which are orchestrated to accomplish well-defined goals, such as goods production or services delivery. From an IT perspective, BPM is closely related to a business process automation approach carried out by use of IT standards and technologies, such as Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) and Web Services. This paper specifically focuses on fully automated business pro- cesses that are defined and executed as orchestrations of software services. In a BPM context the ability to predict at design time the business process behavior assumes a strate- gic relevance, both to early assess whether or not the business goals are achieved and to gain a competitive advantage. A business process is typically specified by use of BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation), the stan- dard language for the high-level description of business processes. Unfortunately BPMN does not support the characterization of the business process in terms of non- functional or QoS properties, such as performance and reliability. To overcome such a limitation, this paper introduces PyBPMN (Performability-enabled BPMN), a lightweight BPMN extension for the specification of performance and reliability properties. Paolo Bocciarelli Dept. of Enterprise Engineering, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy E-mail: bocciarelli@info.uniroma2.it Andrea D’Ambrogio Dept. of Enterprise Engineering, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy E-mail: dambro@uniroma2.it PyBPMN enables the design time prediction of the business processes behavior, in terms of performance and reliability properties. Such prediction activity re- quires the use of models that are to be first built and then evaluated. In this respect, this work introduces a model-driven method that exploits PyBPMN to pre- dict, at design time, the performance and the relia- bility of a business process, either to select the pro- cess configuration that provides the best behavior or to check if a given configuration satisfies the overall requirements. The proposed model-driven method, that enacts the automated analysis of a business process behavior, embraces the complete business process de- velopment cycle, from the specification phase down to the implementation phase. The paper also describes how the proposed model- driven method is implemented. The several model trans- formations at the core of the method have been im- plemented by use of QVT, the standard language for specifying model transformations provided by OMG’s MDA. The availability of such automated model trans- formations allows business analysts to predict the pro- cess behavior with no extra effort and without being re- quired to own specific skills of performance or reliability theory, as shown by use of an example application. Keywords Business Process · MDA · BPMN · performance · QoS · LQN 1 Introduction The term Business Process (BP) refers to the set of activities that companies and organizations carry out to provide services or produce goods. Specifically, a BP can be seen as an orchestration of tasks, each one related to the automated or human resources in charge Pre-print version Published in: Software and System Modeling, 13(2): 573-598 (2014) Link to publisher site: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10270-013-0345-5