WorkFlow net possibilística aplicada aos sistemas de gerenciamento de processos de negócios flexíveis

Abstract

Organizations are increasingly using Workflow Management Systems (WfMS) to reduce costs and improve the performance and efficiency of important business processes. WfMS are used for the modeling, analysis and coordination of structured business processes by groups of people or among multiple organizations. In the field of systems engineering, modeling plays a key role for understanding and controlling the behavior of the systems. Due to changes in the workplace, the business process models (used in WfMS’s) should be continuously adapted which would make them extremely complex. Furthermore, such models may or may not respect the good properties which guarantee the correctness notion of the business process model. Then, the ability to dynamically self-adapt to resource variability, system faults, changing environments and user needs is a key factor for WfMS. Considering this, the term flexibility, as the ability to adjust both behaviors and structures as the necessity to ensure survival, especially in the presence of uncertain behavior, especially in the presence of uncertain behaviors, has been an important topic of study in business processes. Nevertheless, in the business process model, there exists generally little or no flexibility provided by systems to accommodate the natural evolution of the work process or organizational goals. Considering that the lack of flexibility in WfMS makes difficult the support unexpected situations occurring in the work practices, the possibilistic WorkFlow net model was extended to interorganizational WorkFlow nets theory and applied to modeling problems such as deviation, communication failures, deadlock and cancellation in order to treat the flexibility in workflow processes during the time execution. In addition, a specialized inference mechanism, called token player, based on the new model presented is defined, implemented, simulated and validated in the CPN Tools, whose main role is to show the execution of the model proposed aplied to five different business process models. Using the CPN Tools, it was possible to evaluate the resolution of unexpected situations in time execution by token player implemented considering possible situations of behavioral deviations in business processes.