A Three-Layer Model for Business Processes—Process Logic, Case Semantics and Workflow Management

摘要

Workflow management aims at the controlling, monitoring, optimizing and supporting of business processes. Well designed formal models will facilitate such management since they provide explicit representations of business processes as the basis for computerized analysis, verification and execution. Petri Nets have been recognized as the most suitable candidate for workflow modeling, and as such, formal models based on Petri Nets have been proposed, among them WF-net by Aalst is the most popular one. But WF-net has turned out to be conceptually chaotic as will be illustrated in this paper with an example from Aalst's book. This paper proposes a series of models for the description and analysis of business processes at conceptually different hierarchical layers. Analytic goals and methods at these layers are also discussed. The underlying structure, shared by all these models, is SYNCHRONIZER, which is designed with the guidance of synchrony theory of GNT (General Net Theory) and serves as the conceptual foundation of workflow formal models. Structurally, synchronizers connect tasks to form a whole while dynamically synchronizers control tasks to achieve synchronization.