Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
385621 | Expert Systems with Applications | 2011 | 14 Pages |
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.