Study On Workflow Modeling And Analysis Based On Petri Nets

The way in which business processes are organized and managed will directly impact the efficiency of production. Workflow is the automation of a business process in whole or part. Workflow management systems are used to define, create, manage and monitor the execution of workflows. Modeling and analysis of workflows based on formalisms are the foundations of the design and development of workflow management systems. Formal models do not leave any scope for ambiguity and increase the potential for analysis. Petri nets and process algebras are both most widely used formalisms for describing and analyzing discrete-event concurrent systems. This paper studies workflow modeling and analysis techniques based on Petri nets.At the aspect of workflow modeling, the author proposes a method to transform process algebra models of workflow to Petri net models of it, which combines respective advantages of Petri nets and process algebras and improves the flexibility and availability of workflow modeling techniques.Workflow model analysis composes of property analysis, temporal analysis and performance analysis. At the aspect of property analysis, traditional model checking techniques are limited by the problem of state space explosion. The author proposes a new model checking method in this paper, which can effectively compress the state space of models and reduce the computational complexity. At the aspect of temporal analysis, the author puts forward the quantitative and qualitative temporal reasoning methods based on extended interval temporal logic. At the aspect of performance analysis, the author first extends WF-net to WF-SPN, and then proposes a time performance approximate analysis method of WF-SPN, which conquers the problem of state space explosion of traditional methods.