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A Formal Framework for Diagnostic Analysis for Errors of Business Processes

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Transactions on Petri Nets and Other Models of Concurrency XI

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((TOPNOC,volume 9930))

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Abstract

Business process models expressed in languages such as BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation), play a critical role in implementing the workflows in modern enterprises. However, control flow errors such as deadlocks and lack of synchronization, and syntactic errors arising out of poor modeling practices often occur in industrial process models. A major challenge is to provide the means and methods to detect such errors and more importantly, to identify the location of each error. In this work, we develop a formal framework of diagnosing errors by locating their occurrence nodes in business process models at the level of sub-processes and swim-lanes. We use graph-theoretic techniques and Petri net-based analyses to detect syntactic and control flow-related errors respectively. While syntactic errors can be easily located on the processes themselves, we project control-related errors on processes using a mapping from Petri nets to processes. We use this framework to analyze a sample of 174 industrial BPMN process models having 1262 sub-processes in which we identify more than 2000 errors. We are further able to discover how error frequencies change with error depth, how they correlate with the size of the sub-processes and swim-lane interactions in the models, and how they can be predicted in terms of process metrics like sub-process size, coefficient of connectivity, sequentiality and structuredness.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We mark a silent transition as \(t_{AB}\), which connects place A to place B, for notational convenience.

  2. 2.

    The notation \(M+p\) stands for a marking which assigns exactly one token to place p.

  3. 3.

    WPD stands for Worflow Process Definition [VBvdA01], it is actually a proper WF-net.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Prof. K. Narayan Kumar of CMI, Chennai for help on the technical content of the paper. They also thank Sidharth Bihary (a former Infosys employee) for contributing to different ideas of the paper from time to time. Thanks are due to Srivibha S., an ex-Infosys employee for helping with the implementation of the diagnostic framework. Finally the authors are indebted to anonymous referees for helpful comments which have improved the quality of the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Infosys Ltd., #44 Electronics City, Hosur Road, Bangalore, 560 100, India

    Suman Roy

  2. Melbourne Institute of Technology, Sydney, NSW, 2000, Australia

    A. S. M. Sajeev

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  1. Suman Roy
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  2. A. S. M. Sajeev
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Correspondence to Suman Roy .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Newcastle University , Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

    Maciej Koutny

  2. FernUniversität in Hagen , Hagen, Germany

    Jörg Desel

  3. Leiden University , Leiden, The Netherlands

    Jetty Kleijn

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Roy, S., Sajeev, A.S.M. (2016). A Formal Framework for Diagnostic Analysis for Errors of Business Processes. In: Koutny, M., Desel, J., Kleijn, J. (eds) Transactions on Petri Nets and Other Models of Concurrency XI. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9930. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-53401-4_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-53401-4_11

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