Process construction and analysis for workflows modelled by adhesive HLR systems with application conditions

Abstract

Graph transformation systems (gts) are suitable for modelling concurrent and distributed behaviour of systems and in particular of workflows. Analysis of the behaviour of these models is in general highly complex, but it is of main interest, especially for optimizing the system execution. Main focus of the PhD project is a formal approach for constructing the process of a workflow scenario to support possibilities of efficient analysis and execution. Based on the abstract framework of adhesive high level replacement systems the developed techniques will be applied on two levels. First, the framework is instantiated to different kinds of graph as well as Petri net transformation systems, which are key ingredient for modelling mobile networks in [1]. In the second level, the modelling techniques are used to specify the production of industrial products, which can involve several thousands of production steps. A case study will show how a chain of production steps taken from a real production facility can be modelled as gts derivation. Formal techniques for process construction and analysis known for basic cases only have to be extended in various dimensions in order to be applied to the model and in general to the domain of workflows. A practical evaluation will compare the results with those derived by standard techniques for process analysis. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.