Verifying workflow processes: a transformation-based approach

摘要

Workflow modeling is a challenging activity and designers are likely to introduce errors, especially in com plex industrial processes. Effective process verification is essential at design time because the cost of fixing errors dur ing runtime is substantially higher. However, most user-ori ented workflow modeling languages lack formal semantics that hinders such verification. In this paper, we propose a generic approach based on the model transformation to ver ify workflow processes. The model transformation includes two steps: first, it formalizes the desirable semantics of each modeling element; secondly, it translates a workflow pro cess with clear semantics to an equivalent Petri net. Thus, we can verify the original workflow process using existing Petri net theory and analysis tools. As a comprehensive case study, verifying workflow processes in an industrial mod eling language (TiPLM) is presented. Experimental evalua tions on verifying real-world business processes validate our approach.