Diagnosing Workflow Processes using Woflan
Workflow management technology promises a flexible solution for business-process support facilitating the easy creation of new business processes and modification of existing processes.
Unfortunately, today's workflow products have no support for workflow verification.
Errors made at design-time are not detected and result in very costly failures at run-time.
This paper presents the verification tool Woflan.
Woflan analyzes workflow process definitions downloaded from commercial workflow products using state-of-the-art Petri-net-based analysis techniques.
This paper describes the functionality of Woflan emphasizing diagnostics to locate the source of a design error.
Woflan is evaluated via two case studies, one involving twenty groups of students designing a complex workflow process and one involving
an industrial workflow process designed by Staffware Benelux.
The results are encouraging and show that Woflan guides the user in finding and correcting errors in the design of workflows.
The full version is not available, because the report is
superseded by the following publication.
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