Modeling Workflow within Distributed Systems

Journal of Circuits Systems and Computers, 1998

Modern workflow management systems have to support tasks with complex dependency constraints and to cope with resource allocation problem. Therefore the need for analysis method to verify the correctness of workflow specification is becoming crucial. This paper exploits recent advances of structure theory of Petri nets to find efficient structural characterization of the basic soundness property. The obtained results allow the identification and analysis of workflow net classes allowing the modelling of complex synchronization and routing workflow constructs of practical need in particular in the context of collaborative management systems.

Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, 1998

A workflow system, in its general form, is basically a heterogeneous and distributed information system where the tasks are performed using autonomous systems. Resources, such as databases, labor, etc. are typically required to process these tasks. Prerequisite to the execution of a task is a set of constraints that reflect the applicable business rules and user requirements.

1994

Abstract High-level Petri nets have been used to model systems in a variety of application domains, ranging from protocols to logistics. This paper addresses an application domain which is receiving more and more attention: workflows in offices and their management. High-level Petri nets are used to model (1) the workflow in an office environment and (2) the workflow management system to support the control of office work. In this way we will be able to formalize the main concepts.

Application and Theory of Petri Nets 1997, 1997

1996

Workflow management systems facilitate the everyday operation of business processes by taking care of the logistic control of work. In contrast to traditional information systems, they attempt to support frequent changes of the workflows at hand. Therefore, the need for analysis methods to verify the correctness of workflows is becoming more prominent. In this paper we present a method based on Petri nets. This analysis method exploits the structure of the Petri net to find potential errors in the design of the workflow. Moreover, the analysis ...

Asia-Pacific Conference on Conceptual Modelling, 2005

Abstract: In retail information systems it is common practiceto subsume the data of products into product groups,which o#ers organizational advantages for examplewhen new branches are opened, because they are assignedproduct groups instead of single products. Inspiredby this approach, this paper focuses on businessprocesses and proposes the usage of workflowmodules stored in a workflow warehouse, which representreusable, standardized components that are

Formal Aspects of Computing, 2010

Workflow nets , a particular class of Petri nets, have become one of the standard ways to model and analyze workflows. Typically, they are used as an abstraction of the workflow that is used to check the so-called soundness property . This property guarantees the absence of livelocks, deadlocks, and other anomalies that can be detected without domain knowledge. Several authors have proposed alternative notions of soundness and have suggested to use more expressive languages, e.g., models with cancellations or priorities. This paper provides an overview of the different notions of soundness and investigates these in the presence of different extensions of workflow nets . We will show that the eight soundness notions described in the literature are decidable for workflow nets. However, most extensions will make all of these notions undecidable. These new results show the theoretical limits of workflow verification. Moreover, we discuss some of the analysis approaches described in the ...

2008 The 3rd International Conference on Grid and Pervasive Computing - Workshops, 2008

Several years of research are establishing Petri Nets as a modeling formalism for scientific workflows; their formal semantics and the existence of several analysis tools, among others, make them suitable for complex concurrent processes' description. However, the non-determinism of the Petri Net model clashes with the imperative Turingbased environment provided by mainstream programming languages such as C/C++, Java and C#. Therefore several design decisions must be taken in order to provide a concrete implementation of a Petri Net-based engine.

Lectures on Concurrency and Petri Nets, 2004

Over the last decade there has been a shift from "data-aware" information systems to "process-aware" information systems. To support business processes an enterprise information system needs to be aware of these processes and their organizational context. Business Process Management (BPM) includes methods, techniques, and tools to support the design, enactment, management, and analysis of such operational business processes. BPM can be considered as an extension of classical Workflow Management (WFM) systems and approaches. This tutorial introduces models, systems, and standards for the design, analysis, and enactment of workflow processes. Petri nets are used for the modeling and analysis of workflows. Using Petri nets as a formal basis, contemporary systems, languages, and standards for BPM and WFM are discussed. Although it is clear that Petri nets can serve as a solid foundation for BPM/WFM technology, in reality systems, languages, and standards are developed in an ad-hoc fashion. To illustrate this XPDL, the "Lingua Franca" proposed by the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC), is analyzed using a set of 20 basic workflow patterns. This analysis exposes some of the typical semantic problems restricting the application of BPM/WFM technology.