Transforming Workflow Graphs

Abstract

Workflow management systems are very useful for integrating separately developed application systems by controlling flows of execution. For various purposes (e.g. distribution of activities, workflow evolution, time calculation, etc.) it is necessary to change the representation of a workflow, the structure of a workflow graph without changing it’s semantics. We provide an equivalence definition of workflow graphs and introduce a set of basic transformation operations defined on workflow graphs which keep the semantics. We show how these basic operations can be combined to achieve complex transformations and briefly describe a prototypical transformation tool.