Woflan 2.0 - A Petri-net-based Workflow Diagnosis Tool

. Workflow management technology promises a flexible solution facilitating the easy creation of new business processes and modification of existing ones. Unfortunately, most of today's workflow products allow for erroneous processes to be put in production: these products lack proper verification mechanisms in their process-definition tools for the created or modified processes. This paper presents the workflow diagnosis tool Woflan, which fills this gap. Using Petri-net based techniques, Woflan diagnoses process definitions before they are put into production. These process definitions can be imported from commercial workflow products. Furthermore, Woflan guides the modeler of a workflow process definition towards finding and correcting possible errors. 1 Introduction Today's workflow management systems are ill suited to dealing with frequent changes: there are hardly any checks to assure some minimal level of correctness on the process [Aal98,AH00]. Even a simple change li..

Discovering Workflow Performance Models from Timed Logs

Contemporary workflow management systems are ch'iven by explicit process models, i.e., a completely specified workflow design is required in order to enact a given workflow process. Creating a workflow design is a complicated time-consuming process and typically there are discrepancies between the actual workflow processes and the processes as perceived by the management. Therefore, we have developed techniques for discovering workflow models. Starting point for such techniques are so-called "workflow logs" containing information about the workflow process as it is actually being executed. In this paper, we extend our existing mining technique c [4] to incorporate time. We assume that events in workflow logs bear timestamps. This information is used to attribute timing such as queue times to the discovered workflow model. The approach is based on Petri nets and timing information is attached to places. This paper also presents our workflow-mining tool EMIT. This tool translates the workflow log of several commercial systems (e.g., Staffware) to an independent XML format. Based on this format the tool mines for causal relations and produces a graphical workflow model expressed in terms of Petri nets

Analysis of a collaborative workflow process with distributed actors

Current workflow management technology offers rich support for process-oriented coordination of distributed teamwork. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of an industrial workflow process where similar tasks can be performed by various actors at many different locations. We analyzed a large workflow process log with state-of-the-art mining tools associated with the ProM framework. Our analysis leads to the conclusion that there is a positive effect on process performance when workflow actors are geographically close to each other. Our case study shows that the use of workflow technology in itself is not sufficient to level geographical barriers between team members and that additional measures are required for a desirable performance.close41