Application of Equivalence Checking in a Loan Origination Process in Banking Industry

Equivalence checking is traditionally applied to computer system design. It is a promising formal technique for the improvement of software quality. However, it requires detailed specifications of systems and is therefore not very accessible, above all in certain restricted fields of application. One of this domain is business process management. In particular, we examine the applicability of equivalence checking to validation of Business Processes that are mapped through the systems of Workflow Management. The usage of formal methods in business domain, however, is still not widely used. This is due also to the state explosion problem, which says that the state space grows exponentially in the number of concurrent processes. In this paper we consider a heuristic-based methodology developed to combat the state explosion problem for checking process equivalence. Our proposal is two-fold: (i) we show how equivalence checking can be applied in the context of business modelling and analysis; (ii) we evaluate and test the heuristic-based methodology using, as a case study, a real-world banking workflow of a loan origination process. Our investigations suggest that the business community, especially in the banking held, can benefit from this efficient methodology developed in the process algebra area to prevent significant errors. We show and discuss the experimental results obtained.