Formal Speciﬁcation and Veriﬁcation of Cloud Resource Allocation Using Timed Petri-Nets Saoussen Cheikhrouhou 1(B ) , Nesrine Chabouh 1 , Slim Kallel 1 , and Zakaria Maamar 2 1 ReDCAD, University of Sfax, Sfax, Tunisia {saoussen.cheikhrouhou,nesrine.chabouh,slim.kallel}@redcad.tn 2 Zayed University, Dubai, United Arab Emirates zakaria.maamar@zu.ac.ae Abstract. Context : Known for its resource elasticity and pay-per-use model, more and more organizations are adopting cloud computing to support the execution of their business processes. To support organi- AQ1 zations meet their ﬁnancial restrictions, cloud providers oﬀer diﬀerent time-based pricing strategies. Objective : The proposed approach aims at assisting business process designers identify necessary cloud resources with respect to temporal and ﬁnancial restrictions on business processes. The former minimizes the search time for cloud resources while the latter minimizes the cost of leasing these resources. Method : The proposed approach considers 2 inputs, a time- constrained business process speciﬁcation and a list of allocated cloud resources, and then conﬁrms whether this process has the necessary cloud resources, satisﬁes the temporal and ﬁnancial restrictions, and is deadlock-free. To this end, the speciﬁcation is automatically translated into a Temporal Petri-Net. Results : The implementation on a real case study has shown that the proposed approach ensures a proper matching between process activities and cloud resources. Keywords: Formal veriﬁcation · Cloud resource · Business process Temporal properties 1 Introduction With the rapid evolution of information and communication technologies, many organizations are taping into the world of cloud computing to reduce the oper- ation costs associated with managing their Business Processes (BP). Among cloud beneﬁts, we cite resource availability upon-request (aka elasticity) and pay-per-use model [12]. To cater to organizations’ multiple needs, cloud providers oﬀer diﬀerent pricing strategies for their computation, storage, and communi- cation resources. For instance, Amazon Web Services (AWS) oﬀers on-demand, c  Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 E. H. Abdelwahed et al. (Eds.): MEDI 2018, CCIS 929, pp. 1–10, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02852-7_4 Author Proof