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

  • Authors:

  • Shiow-yang Wu;Kuo-Chang Lin

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Dong Hwa University, Hualien, Taiwan, ROC;Enterprise Promotion Association, National Information Infrastructure, 7F, 317, Song-Chiang Road, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC

  • Venue:
  • Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

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.