Process architecture

About: Process architecture is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4876 publications have been published within this topic receiving 104171 citations.

Stochastic petri nets with timed and immediate transitions

Abstract: Stochastic Petri nets with timed and immediate transitions permit representation of concurrency, synchronization, and communication and provide a general framework for discrete event simulation. Formal definition of the marking process of a stochastic Petri net is in terms of a general state space Markov chain that describes the net at successive marking change epochs. We obtain a limit theorem for irreducible marking processes with finite timed marking set. In addition, we provide conditions on the building blocks of a stochastic Petri net under which the marking process is a regenerative process in continuous time with finite cycle length moments. These results establish the regenerative method for simulation analysis in the stochastic Petri net setting

Enabling flexible location-aware business process modeling and execution

Abstract: Business process management (BPM) has emerged as one of the abiding systematic management approaches in order to design, execute and govern organizational business processes. Traditionally, most attention within the BPM community has been given to studying control-flow aspects, without taking other contextual aspects into account. This paper contributes to the existing body of work by focusing on the particular context of geospatial information. We argue that explicitly taking this context into consideration in the modeling and execution of business processes can contribute to improve their effectiveness and efficiency. As such, the goal of this paper is to make the modeling and execution aspects of BPM location-aware, i.e. to govern and constrain control-flow and process behavior based on location-based constraints. We do so by proposing a Petri net modeling extension which is formalized by means of a mapping to colored Petri nets (CPNs). Our approach has been implemented using CPN Tools and a simulation extension was developed to support the execution of location-aware process models. We also illustrate the feasibility of coupling business process support systems with geographic information systems by means of an experimental case.

Verifying soundness of business processes: A decision process Petri nets approach

Abstract: This paper presents a trajectory-tracking approach for verifying soundness of workflow/Petri nets represented by a decision-process Petri net. Well-formed business processes correspond to sound workflow nets. The advantage of this approach is its ability to represent the dynamic behavior of the business process. We show that the problem of finding an optimum trajectory for validation of well-formed business processes is solvable. To prove our statement we use the Lyapunov stability theory to tackle the soundness verification problem for decision-process Petri nets. As a result, applying Lyapunov theory, the well-formed verification (soundness) property is solved showing that the workflow net representation using decision process Petri nets is uniformly practically stable. It is important to note that in a complexity-theoretic sense checking the soundness property is computationally tractable, we calculate the computational complexity for solving the problem. We show the connection between workflow nets and partially ordered decision-process Petri net used for business process representation and analysis. Our computational experiment of supply chains demonstrate the viability of the modeling and solution approaches for solving computer science problems.

The optimization problem based on alternatives aggregation Petri nets as models for industrial discrete event systems

Abstract: The construction, set-up and operation of many systems of interest in sectors such as industry, supply chains and communications are complex processes, which may require significant investment of resources. For this reason, the automation of the decision making for achieving the best design and operation of such systems, which may be regarded as discrete event systems (DESs), constitutes an active research field. In this paper, we present a methodology to cope with this process in an efficient way, optimizing not only the behaviour of the DES but also its structure. This kind of problem is usually associated with the so-called combinatorial explosion, since the number of alternative configurations for the DES might be huge. We present an improved algorithm to transform a set of alternative Petri nets, representing alternative structural configurations, into a more compact model called an alternatives aggregation Petri net. In real decision-making problems, where the different alternative structural configurations may share common subnets, this compact model may allow the development of a much more efficient optimization problem than the classic approach of 'divide and conquer'. The achievement of this objective is performed by developing a single and compact model for all of the alternative structural configurations of the DES and the simulation of the most promising of them. In this paper, the mentioned methodology is introduced and its advantages and drawbacks are described in relation with the classic approach.

Formal Transformation from Sequence Diagrams to Coloured Petri Nets

Abstract: In this paper we define a formal strongly consistent transformation from UML2 sequence diagrams to coloured Petri nets (CPNs). We define the language of sequence diagrams (set of legal traces) and show how this is mapped onto an equivalent language of CPNs through formal transformation rules. The rules defined can be extended to consider modelling aspects such as stochastic and real-time behaviour. This work is part of a more general framework based on model driven transformations to validate UML models using Petri nets, and hence exploit existing Petri net analysis and verification tools for UML-based design.