Structured design, consistency analysis and failure reasoning of business workflows with activity-control templates and causal ordering

The design, analysis, control and diagnosis of business workflows have been major challenges for enterprise information system designers. We propose a structured framework for workflow design, formal semantics, consistency analysis, execution automation and failure reasoning targeting E-commerce app...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Expert systems with applications 2011-07, Vol.38 (7), p.8000-8013
Main Authors: Wu, Shiow-yang, Lin, Kuo-Chang
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Algorithms
Business
Consistency
Consistency analysis
Design engineering
Diagnosis
Extensible Markup Language
Failure
Failure reasoning
Formal semantics
Reasoning
Structured templates
Workflow
Workflow modeling
XML
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Summary:The design, analysis, control and diagnosis of business workflows have been major challenges for enterprise information system designers. We propose a structured framework for workflow design, formal semantics, consistency analysis, execution automation and failure reasoning targeting E-commerce applications. A business workflow is modeled by using a visual tool named activity-control (AC) diagram. Frequently occurring business procedures are captured by the adoptions of reusable AC templates. With formally defined semantics by a combination of first-order logic and happen-before causal ordering in distributed system theory, workflow consistency can be mechanically analyzed at design time while failure reasoning can be applied at execution time for problem diagnosis. A completely specified model is automatically converted to a workflow by an iterative traversal algorithm that maps an AC diagram to an XML workflow specification which can then be executed automatically by an XML workflow engine. A failure reasoning and diagnosis algorithm is devised to find all possible causes of a failed execution when problems occur. Preliminary proof-of-concept implementation and evaluation results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our framework and techniques.
ISSN:0957-4174
1873-6793
DOI:10.1016/j.eswa.2010.12.121