A Formal Approach to Workflow Analysis

Abstract

A gile manufacturing, fast-response micromarketing, and the rise of the virtual organization have led managers to focus on cross-functional business processes that link various divisions and organizations. These processes may be realized as one or more workflows, each of which is an instantiation of a process under certain conditions. Because an ability to adapt processes to workflow conditions is essential for organizational responsiveness, identifying and analyzing significant workflows is an important activity for managers, organization designers, and information systems specialists. A variety of software systems have been developed to aid in the structuring and implementation of workflow systems, but they are mostly visualization tools with few analytical capabilities. For example, they do not allow their users to easily determine which information elements are needed to compute other information elements, whether certain tasks depend on other tasks, and how resource availability affects information and tasks. Analyses of this type can be performed by inspection, but this gives rise to the possibility of error, especially in large systems. In this paper, we show how a mathematical construct called a metagraph can be used to represent workflows, so that such questions can be addressed through formal operations, leading to more effective design of organizational processes.

Research Commentary: Information Systems and Conceptual Modeling—A Research Agenda

“…• events, processes, and workflows (e.g., Curtis et al 1992, Basu and Blanning 2000, van der Aalst et al 2000.…”

Multi-agent models in workflow design

“…Most workflow modeling techniques lack capabilities to capture different aspects of a workflow system such as data, process and organization (resources) in a single consistent view (Bajaj & Ram, 2002). In (Basu & Blanning, 2000) was proposed a framework that integrates the informational, functional, and organizational perspectives of the workflow in a single model and in (Bajaj & Ram, 2002) was proposed State-Entity-Activity-Model using set theory. A major problem is that of the ontology in every domain (Kishore et al, 2004).…”

Personal Workflows: Modeling and Management

“…For representation purpose, we adopt meta graph for visualizing data dependencies. A metagarph is a graph-theoretic construct that captures relationships between pairs of sets of elements [2]. In its pictorial representation, a set of elements is surrounded by a small cycle, and the edges are arrows connecting the cycles.…”

“…In either case, the entire process definition is considered incorrect and needs modification. Details for checking the existence of a metapath can be found in [2], which also shows several other types of workflow analysis. Since a personal process is modeled as a combination of task set and data set, traditional set operations like intersection (∩), union (∪), and difference (−) are applicable.…”