Workflow ART: a framework for multidimensional workflow analysis

Abstract

Business processes are obliged to follow numerous constraints, such as compliance regulations, service level agreements, security regulations and budget constraints. To be able to understand relations between different constraint types and their impact on the business, a common constraint specification framework is required. This work presents a framework that provides visual support for the analysis of the different constraints a business process has to adhere to by mapping the business process model to the cuboids in 3D space and business process constraints to the spatial restrictions of this space. This enables a business process designer to gain insight into how different constraints influence the process as a whole.

Keywords:

• workflow modelling
• workflow analysis
• workflow constraints
• constraint classification
• workflow dimensions
• workflow design

Notes

1. This work is restricted to acyclic workflows, however, cycles can be represented by specifying task occurrence constraints on an abstract time interval.

2. In general, there are 3 ⁿ possible combinations for all interval relations, which are distributed as follows: 1 combination goes into category in, 2 ⁿ −1 combinations go into category out and the remaining 3 ⁿ −2 ⁿ −2 go into category over. In case of two dimensions, these numbers are 1, 3 and 5 correspondingly.