An error-comprising workflow definition might provoke seriousproblems to an enterprise, especially when it is involved with missioncritical business processes. Concurrency of workflow processes is knownas one of the major sources causing such an invalid workflow processdefinition. So, the conflicts caused by concurrent workflow processesshould be considered deliberately when defining concurrent workflowprocesses. However, it is very difficult to ascertain whether a workflowprocess is free from conflicts or not without any experimentalexecutions at runtime; this would be very tedious and time consumingwork for process designers. If we can analyze the conflicts immanent inconcurrent workflow definition prior to runtime, it would be veryhelpful to business process designers and many other users of workflowmanagement systems. The authors propose a set-based constraint system toanalyze possible read-write conflicts and write-write conflicts betweenactivities which read and write to the shared variables in a workflowprocess definition. The system is composed of two phases. In the firstphase, it generates set constraints from a structured workflowdefinition. In the second phase, it finds the minimal solution of theset constraints
展开▼
