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 new diagnostics to locate the source of a design error. Based on a case
study (involving twenty groups of students designing a complex workflow process), these new
diagnostics have been evaluated and the results have been used to develop a method to guide
the user of Woflan 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superseded by the following publication.
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