Diagnostic Information for Control-Flow Analysis of Workflow Graphs (a.k.a. Free-Choice Workflow Nets)

Favre, Cédric; Völzer, Hagen; Müller, Péter

doi:10.1007/978-3-662-49674-9_27

Cited by 11 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Favre et al proposed another approach based on anti-patterns [50]. The patterns are similar to those of Dongens et al [49], however apply to cyclic workflows.…”

Section: Pattern-and Compiler-based Approachesmentioning

confidence: 93%

Control-Flow-Based Methods to Support the Development of Sound Workflows

Prinz

Amme

2021

CSIMQ

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Workflows describe sequences of tasks to achieve goals. These sequences can contain decisions, loops, and parallelisations and are, therefore, similar to computer programs. Experts in the domain of workflow application usually design these workflows. However, these experts are rarely IT experts. For this reason, after automation by a computer, workflows can exhibit undesired behaviors. Such behaviors can be expensive and dangerous and should be avoided. The notion of soundness describes the absence of the undesired behaviors of deadlocks and abundances. The state of the art in workflow verification can detect such behaviors, but gives no indication of causes, does not provide detailed diagnostic information, or is slow. This article introduces two new compiler-based techniques to find causes of deadlocks and abundances. These techniques provide detailed diagnostic information and have a cubic asymptotic complexity of runtime. Their efficiency and quality is evaluated using a benchmark of over thousand real-world workflows together with two leading state-of-the-art approaches.

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“…Favre et al proposed another approach based on anti-patterns [50]. The patterns are similar to those of Dongens et al [49], however apply to cyclic workflows.…”

Section: Pattern-and Compiler-based Approachesmentioning

confidence: 93%

Control-Flow-Based Methods to Support the Development of Sound Workflows

Prinz

Amme

2021

CSIMQ

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“…In this article, we aim at solving the problems found in the existing works [26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33] by transforming BPMN onto Petri nets. Our approach integrates the ideas in previous works [30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44] to present a novel method of transforming BPMN elements (i.e. events, gateways, activities, pools, connecting objects, and lanes) onto equivalent Petri net elements.…”

Section: Contribution Of This Workmentioning

confidence: 97%

Transformation of Business Process Model and Notation models onto Petri nets and their analysis

Mutarraf

Barkaoui

et al. 2018

Advances in Mechanical Engineering

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Business Process Model and Notation is known as a widely used standard for business processes modeling. However, its main drawback is that it lacks formal semantics, leading to some undesirable properties, such as livelocks and deadlocks, such that it creates models with semantic errors. In order to formally verify them, we need to transform it onto a formal language, for example, Petri nets. The approach proposed in this article is an extension of previous approaches stated in the literature by adding probability to gateways and time to transitions. The first aim is to transform the Business Process Model and Notation process diagram onto Petri nets automatically using a developed software package. The developed software package is capable of transforming the XML file of a Business Process Model and Notation process diagram into ''m'' files of a Petri net. The ''m'' files of the Petri net are then coupled with the General Purpose Petri Net Simulator (GPenSIM) for analysis in MATLAB. The second aim is to manually transform the Business Process Model and Notation process diagram using mapping figures onto Petri nets and then analyze it using Timed Petri Net Analyzer tools. The advantage of transforming a Business Process Model and Notation diagram automatically is that we can add time to transitions and probability to gateways. Furthermore, the simulation time can be checked using MATLAB.

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“…We presented a polynomial time algorithm for the computation of the expected cost of free-choice workflow nets, a subclass of PWN of particular interest for the workflow process community (see e.g. [1,13,14,10]). For example, 1386 of the 1958 nets in the most popular benchmark suite in the literature are free-choice Workflow Nets [12].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Computing the Expected Execution Time of Probabilistic Workflow Nets

Meyer

Esparza

Offtermatt

2019

Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems

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Free-Choice Workflow Petri nets, also known as Workflow Graphs, are a popular model in Business Process Modeling. In this paper we introduce Timed Probabilistic Workflow Nets (TPWNs), and give them a Markov Decision Process (MDP) semantics. Since the time needed to execute two parallel tasks is the maximum of the times, and not their sum, the expected time cannot be directly computed using the theory of MDPs with rewards. In our first contribution, we overcome this obstacle with the help of "earliest-first" schedulers, and give a single exponential-time algorithm for computing the expected time. In our second contribution, we show that computing the expected time is #P-hard, and so polynomial algorithms are very unlikely to exist. Further, #P-hardness holds even for workflows with a very simple structure in which all transitions times are 1 or 0, and all probabilities are 1 or 0.5. Our third and final contribution is an experimental investigation of the runtime of our algorithm on a set of industrial benchmarks. Despite the negative theoretical results, the results are very encouraging. In particular, the expected time of every workflow in a popular benchmark suite with 642 workflow nets can be computed in milliseconds.1 In [2], which examines many different notions of soundness, this is called easy soundness.

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Diagnostic Information for Control-Flow Analysis of Workflow Graphs (a.k.a. Free-Choice Workflow Nets)

Cited by 11 publications

References 15 publications

Control-Flow-Based Methods to Support the Development of Sound Workflows

Control-Flow-Based Methods to Support the Development of Sound Workflows

Transformation of Business Process Model and Notation models onto Petri nets and their analysis

Computing the Expected Execution Time of Probabilistic Workflow Nets

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