Reliability of BPMN Business Processes

Organizations increasingly use business processes and the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) to model them. Taking into account the relevance of Quality of Service (QoS) aspects in business processes, we can find in the literature some proposals that already calculate reliability of structured workflows and service compositions, as well as some proposals that extend BPMN to include cost, availability, and reliability, among others QoS aspects.In this paper we focus on reliability and we calculate the reliability of the overall BPMN process starting from the reliability value of its activities. We use the Stochastic Workflow Reduction method, which applies a set of reductions rules to process blocks. To accomplish this, we extend BPMN with reliability information and we identify the BPMN process blocks for which we can apply a reduction. We apply our approach to a use case concerning a simplified paper reviewing process. In addition, we identify the limitations of our proposal, which are intrinsic to the BPMN non-block structure. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first proposal to compute the reliability of BPMN business processes.