Ensuring the Semantic Correctness of a BAUML Artifact-centric BPM Montserrat Estañol a,∗ , Maria-Ribera Sancho a,b , Ernest Teniente a a Department of Service and Information Systems Engineering Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain b Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Barcelona, Spain Abstract Context: Using models to represent business processes provides several advantages, such as facilitating the communication between the stakeholders or being able to check the correctness of the processes before their implementation. In contrast to traditional process modeling approaches, the artifact-centric approach treats data as a key element of the process, also considering the tasks or activities that are performed in it. Objective: This paper presents a way to verify and validate the semantic correctness of an artifact- centric business process model defined using a combination of UML and OCL models - a BAUML model. Method: We achieve our goal by presenting several algorithms that encode the initial models into first- order logic, which then allows to use an existing satisfiability checking tool to determine their correctness. Results: An approach to verify and validate an artifact-centric BPM specified in BAUML, which uses a combination of UML and OCL models. To do this, we provide a method to translate all BAUML components into a set of logic formulas. The result of this translation ensures that the only changes allowed are those specified in the model, and that those changes are taking place according the order established by the model. Having obtained this logic representation, these models can be validated by any existing reasoning method able to deal with negation of derived predicates. Moreover, we show how to automatically generate the relevant tests to validate the models. We also show the feasibility of our approach by implementing a prototype tool and applying it to a running example. Conclusion: It is feasible to ensure the semantic correctness of an artifact-centric business process model in practice. Keywords: verification, validation, reasoning, tool, business process modelling, uml 1. Introduction Representing business processes using models has several advantages, such as improving communication between the parties involved in the process or having a reference model to which real executions of the process can be compared to. Moreover, with models it is possible to check their correctness before business processes are deployed. Detecting these errors in the early stages of the process definition will help to avoid the cost of later correction, when the process is already running. There are different types of tests that can be performed to detect these errors. For example, syntactic tests would ensure that the language used to represent the business process is used correctly and structural tests would find errors such as lack of synchronization or deadlocks caused by errors in the flow. Note that these tests only consider the structure of the model and do not deal with additional elements such as the actual changes performed by the tasks in the process. In contrast, semantic tests take into consideration the meaning of the different tasks that are carried out by the process. Therefore, they can provide the stakeholders with valuable information in terms of what the * Corresponding author Email addresses: estanyol@essi.upc.edu (Montserrat Estañol), ribera@essi.upc.edu (Maria-Ribera Sancho), teniente@essi.upc.edu (Ernest Teniente) Preprint submitted to Elsevier July 14, 2017