BP2SAN

BP2SAN is a software tool that automatically converts business processes modeled as annotated BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) process diagrams to SAN (Stochastic Automata Networks).

BPMN is a graphical notation of OMG (Object Management Group) created to standardize the representation of business processes. Despite being able to support business users in different phases of the business process life cycle, BPMN models have no formal semantics. They are not well suited to qualitative and quantitative analyses. Furthermore, BPMN diagrams do not provide mechanisms to quantify the computational/human effort required to perform the activities, nor the capacity of work of shared resources and their access policies. This deficiency hinders the use of BPMN for performance evaluation.

SAN is a structured Markovian formalism that enables us to build stochastic models in a compositional approach. Created to attenuate the well-known state space explosion problem associated with the Markovian formalisms, SAN can be applied in the modeling of parallel and distributed systems with large state spaces. It is very efficient regarding the memory consumption, in addition to provide the concept of functional rates - that can facilitate the modeling and help reduce the size of the state-space.

More than support verification, SAN models support the performance evaluation of business processes via numerical analysis.

The BP2SAN tool is able to convert a subclass of the BPMN process diagrams to SAN models that reflect the modeled control-flow of the business processes. In addition, when information about the resource requirements of the BPMN process diagrams are provided to the tool, the automatically generated SAN models contemplate the resource management policy associated to the process (or, in other words, they are models ready to provide performance indices).
The input files for the BP2SAN tool must be BPMN models textually specified using the DOT Language and (optionally) files describing the resources/requirements associated to the BPMN models. These last files must contain declarations in a language specifically created for resources/requirements specification in the BP2SAN tool.
The generated SAN models are textually expressed using the syntax accepted by the PEPS tool (a software which allows to numerically solve SAN modes).
For the details about the input and output files of the tool, please see the BP2SAN User's Guide.

Binary Files

• March 7, 2011 - bp2san-1_0.zip (BP2SAN tool)
  Uncompress this file to generate the directory bp2san and all the hierarchy of required files (including examples) to execute the tool.

Documents

• BP2SAN User's Guide
• From Business Process Model and Notation to Stochastic Automata Network - a technical report that describes the algorithm used to implement part of the functionalities of the BP2SAN tool.
  Technical report (Reference Number: RT-MAC-2011-03), IME-USP, 2011.
  Authors: BRAGHETTO, K. R., FERREIRA, J. E., VINCENT, J.-M.

Warning: BP2SAN requires Java 6 to run.

Publications about NPDL and NPTool:

• Performance Evaluation of Resource-Aware Business Processes Using Stochastic Automata Networks.
  BRAGHETTO, K. R., FERREIRA, J. E., VINCENT, J.-M.
  International Journal of Innovative Computing, Information and Control (IJICIC), 2012. [to appear]
• Performance Evaluation of Business Processes through a Formal Transformation to SAN.
  BRAGHETTO, K. R., FERREIRA, J. E., VINCENT, J.-M.
  In Proceedings of the 8th European Performance Engineering Workshop (EPEW 2011), Borrowdale, UK, October, 2011, pages 42 - 56. LNCS Volume 6977, Springer.
• Performance Analysis Modeling Applied to Business Processes.
  BRAGHETTO, K. R., FERREIRA, J. E., VINCENT, J.-M.
  In Proceedings of the 2010 Spring Simulation Multiconference (SpringSim'10), Orlando, FL, USA, April, 2010, pages 122:1 - 122:8. ACM.