Towards Ontology-based Anti-Patterns for the Verification of Business Process Behavior

A business process model defines how an organization perform its activities. Since the incorrect definition of business processes behavior may increase costs and development time, it is required the verification of process behavior. Verification methods based on anti-patterns are a promising approach to deal with this issue, but their informal definition may lead to ambiguities and different interpretations of what problem a given anti-pattern represents, and how it should be applied or implemented to detect behavioral errors in process models. The aim of this paper is to assess the feasibility of business process behavior verification by means of the ontological specification of behavioral anti-patterns. The study is based on the detection of anti-patterns in a BPMN process model by exploiting a set of standard ontological reasoning services.