Business process (BP) reengineering is defined as reinventing BPs either structurally or technically to achieve dramatic improvements in performance. In any business process reengineering (BPR) project, process modeling is used to reason about problems found in existing (as-is) process and helps to design target (to-be) process. BP model notation is a widely accepted standard for process modeling. “Expressiveness” and “missing formal semantics” are two problems reported to its modeling practices. In existing studies, solutions to these problems are also proposed but still have certain limitations. The paper aims to discuss this issue.,In proposed methodology, a meta-model is formally defined that is composed of commonly used modeling elements and their well-formedness rules to check for syntactic and structural correctness of process models. Proposed solution also check semantics of process models and allows to compare as-is and to-be process models for gap identification which is another important aspect of BPR. To achieve the first goal, Z specification is used to provide formal specifications of modeling constructs and their rules and Z3 (an SMT solver) is used for comparisons and verifying properties.,Proposed method addresses both “expressiveness” and “missing formal semantics” of BPR models. The results of its evaluation clearly indicate that using formally specified meta-model, BPR model is syntactically and structurally correct. Moreover, formal modeling of BPs in Z3 helped to compare processes and to check control flow properties.,Although the proposed method is tested on an example that is widely used in BPR literature, the example is only covering modeling elements which are part of the proposed subset and are reported in literature as frequently used modeling elements. A separate detailed study is required to test it on more complex systems.,Specifying process models using Z specification and Z3 solver requires certain expertise.,The proposed method adds value to BPR body of knowledge as it proposes a method to ensure structural and syntactic correctness of models, highlighting the importance of verifying run time properties and providing a direction toward comparing process models for gap analysis.

中文翻译：

---

形式化方法在业务流程再造的建模和分析方面的应用

业务流程（BP）重新设计的定义是在结构上或技术上重新设计BP，以实现性能的显着改善。在任何业务流程再造（BPR）项目中，都使用流程建模来推理现有（按原样）流程中发现的问题，并有助于设计目标（将来）流程。BP模型表示法是一种广泛接受的过程建模标准。向其建模实践报告的两个问题是“表现力”和“缺少形式语义”。在现有的研究中，也提出了解决这些问题的方法，但是仍然有一定的局限性。本文旨在讨论这一问题。在提出的方法中，正式定义了一个元模型，该元模型由常用的建模元素及其格式正确的规则组成，以检查过程模型的句法和结构正确性。提出的解决方案还检查过程模型的语义，并允许比较过程模型和将来的过程模型以进行间隙识别，这是BPR的另一个重要方面。为了实现第一个目标，使用Z规范提供建模构造及其规则的形式规范，并使用Z3（SMT求解器）进行比较和验证属性。拟议的方法解决了模型的“表达性”和“缺失形式语义” BPR模型。其评估结果清楚地表明，使用正式指定的元模型，BPR模型在语法和结构上都是正确的。此外，在Z3中对BP进行形式化建模有助于比较过程并检查控制流属性。尽管已在BPR文献中广泛使用的示例对所提出的方法进行了测试，该示例仅涵盖建模元素，这些建模元素是建议的子集的一部分，并且在文献中被报告为常用的建模元素。需要对单独的详细研究进行测试，以在更复杂的系统上进行测试。使用Z规范和Z3求解器指定过程模型需要一定的专业知识。建议的方法为BPR知识体系增加了价值，因为它提出了一种确保结构和语法正确性的方法。模型，强调了验证运行时属性的重要性，并提供了一个方向，以比较用于差距分析的过程模型。