Modeling And Analyzing Collaborative Workflow Based On Hierarchical Colored Petri Nets

With the fierce competition among businesses and the changing business environment increasingly, people have more and more high demand on the reliability and validity of business process management. One of the major ways to achieve a reliable, highly flexible, dynamic and high performance workflow system is workflow modeling. It separates the business process logic from the actual system to realize process modeling, simulation and analysis. With the development of workflow technology, workflow models become more and more complicated, dynamic and complex, which give a big challenge to the traditional workflow modeling methods like the UML diagram and the basic Petri net. Because of the large scale, complexity and variety of resources of workflow model, the basic Petri net is expanded on level and color technology, which calls Hierarchical Colored Petri Net (HCPN) to describe the flow information. Since the introduction of color and layering technology, with the support of CPN-Tools, a corresponding powerful modeling software, Hierarchical Colored Petri net (HCPN)has been widely used in the field of workflow modeling.In this paper, the medical information service system of Qingdao Sanatorium in Shandong Province is introduced as a reference, which was modeled based on Hierarchical Colored Petri nets. In-depth study on Petri Net modeling technology of workflow domestic and abroad, an algorithm of collaborative workflow modeling based on HCPN is proposed and the HCPN collaborative workflow model of the medical information service is constructed, and the correctness and the character of analysis of the model is verified, the established model is proved to be feasible and effective by analyzing the simulation results generated by CPN-Tools, which provides a theoretical basis and model foundation to the next step of the establishment in sanatorium system procedures.The main contents of this paper are as follows:The interrelated knowledge of workflow and Petri net is introduced, the advantages of Petri net in workflow modeling are discussed, and the method of collaborative workflow modeling based on Petri net is proposed.The concepts of color Petri net and Hierarchical Color Petri net are described and the graphical representation, operating rules and the nature analyzing of Hierarchical Color Petri net are summarized.The algorithm of collaborative workflow modeling based on Hierarchical Color Petri net is proposed, which combined with the example of health care service system of Qingdao Sanatorium in Shandong Province, and based on which the HCPN model is constructed and the static and dynamic nature of the model is analyzed.A simulation tool named CPN-Tools is used for our model simulation, and the simulation results indicate that the model is feasible, which has a certain significance for the establishment of the actual system.