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This paper aims at supporting business process designers in modelling collaborative scenarios in terms of hierarchical BPMN collaboration diagrams, to enforce consistency among different hierarchical levels.

The proposed approach is based on a set of guidelines to apply during the modelling of hierarchical diagrams. These guidelines address consistency issues related to the hiding capability provided by sub-process and call activity elements, which may obscure behaviours at inner levels, especially exchange of messages, that are inconsistent with those in other hierarchical levels. A laboratory experience validates the guidelines' effectiveness.

The paper points out the issues of hierarchical diagrams, and the lack of support in this context from the existing BPMN modelling tools. Moreover, through a laboratory experience, the paper shows the benefits carried by the proposed guidelines concerning the quality of the modelled diagrams.

The proposed guidelines have been implemented in a consistency checking tool that avoids consistency errors during the modelling activity. To foster its usage, the tool has been integrated into the Eclipse BPMN modelling environment.

The paper, employing consistency guidelines, provides a novel solution to the weaknesses of hierarchical modelling.

Public services can be modelled, analysed and implemented using notations and tools for the business process (BP) abstraction. Applying such an explicit approach public administrations (PAs) can better react to the undergoing transformation in service provisioning and they can continuously improve service quality in order to satisfy citizens and business requests, while coping with decreasing budgets. The purpose of this paper is to discuss these issues.

The proposed approach relies on using formal methods, in particular unfolding to analyse the correctness of BP. The paper also compares and selects mapping rules from semi-formal to formal modelling languages; these techniques are presented in the context of the BP Modelling Languages and Petri Net (PN).

Main aim of this paper is to raise the need for formal verification of BP governing the interactions among PAs, which more and more need to be supported by ICT mechanisms, and then are not so much tolerant to errors and imperfections in the process specification. The paper illustrates the main motivations of such a work and it introduces a verification technique of a BP using a mapping of a high-level notation (such as BPMN 2.0) to a formal notation (such as PNs) for which formal analysis techniques can be adopted. In particular the verification step is implemented using an unfolding-based technique.

The paper answers a call for further development of the body of knowledge on effective analysis of BPs, a rapidly emerging field of interest for large and ultra large scenarios, where a clear gap in literature exists. Than the paper shows that formal techniques are mature enough to be applied on real scenarios.