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.
(postscript / pdf version of the complete paper)
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