Where did i go wrong? explaining errors in business process models

Business process modeling is still a challenging task - especially since more and more aspects are added to the models, such as data lifecycles, security constraints, or compliance rules. At the same time, formal methods allow for a detection of errors in the early modeling phase. Detected errors are usually explained with a path from the initial to the error state. These paths can grow unmanageably and make the understanding and fixing of errors very time consuming. This paper addresses this issue and proposes a novel explanation of errors: Instead of listing the actions on the path to the error, only the decisions that lead to it are reported and highlighted in the original model. Furthermore, we exploit concurrency to create a compact artifact to explain errors. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.