Decomposition-based Verification of Global Compliance in Process Choreographies

Abstract

The verification of global compliance rules (GCR) in process choreographies (e.g., partner-spanning quality assurance in supply chains) is crucial and challenging due to the restricted visibility of the private processes of the collaborating partners. This paper provides a novel algorithm that decomposes global compliance rules into assertions that can be verified by the partners in a distributed way without revealing any private process details. The decomposition is based on transitivity properties of the underlying GCR specification. This work uses GCR based on antecedent and occurrence patterns and illustrates the transitivity properties based on their specification in first order predicate logic. It is formally shown that the original GCR can be reconstructed from the assertions, which ensures the viability of the approach. The algorithms are prototypically implemented and applied to several scenarios. The ability of checking global compliance constitutes a fundamental pillar of any approach implementing process choreographies with multiple partners.