Skip to main content

Mining and Re-engineering Transactional Workflows for Reliable Executions

  • Conference paper
Conceptual Modeling - ER 2007 (ER 2007)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 4801))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

A continuous evolution of business process parameters, constraints and needs, hardly foreseeable initially, requires from the business process management systems a continuous design and a reliable process model. In this paper, we are interested in developing a reactive design through a process log analysis ensuring process re-engineering and execution reliability.

We propose to analyse workflow logs to discover workflow transactional behavior and to improve and correct related recovery mechanisms subsequently. Our approach starts by collecting workflow logs. Then, we build, by statistical analysis techniques, an intermediate representation specifying elementary dependencies between activities. These dependencies are refined to mine the transactional workflow model. The analysis of the discrepancies between the discovered model and the initially designed model enables us to detect design gaps, concerning particularly the recovery mechanisms. Thus, based on this mining step, we apply a set of rules on the initially designed workflow to improve workflow reliability.

This material is based upon works supported by the EU funding under the SUPER project (FP6-026850).

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. ter Hofstede, A.H.M., Orlowska, M.E., Rajapakse, J.: Verification problems in conceptual workflow specifications. Data Knowl. Eng. 24(3), 239–256 (1998)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  2. van der Aalst, W.M.P.: The Application of Petri Nets to Workflow Management. The Journal of Circuits, Systems and Computers 8(1), 21–66 (1998)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Adam, N.R., Atluri, V., Huang, W.-K.: Modeling and analysis of workflows using petri nets. J. Intell. Inf. Syst. 10(2), 131–158 (1998)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Eder, J., Liebhart, W.: Workflow recovery. In: Conference on Cooperative Information Systems, pp. 124–134 (1996)

    Google Scholar 

  5. van der Aalst, W.M.P., van Dongen, B.F.: Workflow mining: A survey of issues and approaches. In: Data and Knowledge Engineering (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Eder, J., Olivotto, G.E., Gruber, W.: A data warehouse for workflow logs. In: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Engineering and Deployment of Cooperative Information Systems, pp. 1–15. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  7. zur Muehlen, M.: Process-driven management information systems - combining data warehouses and workflow technology. In: Gavish, B. (ed.) Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Electronic Commerce Research (ICECR-4), Dallas (TX), pp. 550–566. Southern Methodist University (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Cook, J.E., Wolf, A.L.: Event-based detection of concurrency. In: Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering, pp. 35–45. ACM Press, New York (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Gaaloul, W.: La Découverte de Workflow Transactionnel pour la Fiabilisation des Exécutions. Phd thesis, Université Henri Poincaré - Nancy 1, LORIA(November 3, 2006)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Georgakopoulos, D., Hornick, M., Sheth, A.: An overview of workflow management: from process modeling to workflow automation infrastructure. Distrib. Parallel Databases 3(2), 119–153 (1995)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Sheth, A., Rusinkiewicz, M.: On transactional workflows. Special Issue on Workflow and Extended Transaction Systems IEEE Computer Society  (1993)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Elmagarmid, A.K.: Database transaction models for advanced applications. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc, San Francisco (1992)

    Google Scholar 

  13. van der Aalst, W.M.P., Barros, A.P., ter Hofstede, A.H.M., Kiepuszewski, B.: Advanced Workflow Patterns. In: Scheuermann, P., Etzion, O. (eds.) CoopIS 2000. LNCS, vol. 1901, pp. 18–29. Springer, Heidelberg (2000)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  14. Elmagarmid, A., Leu, Y., Litwin, W.: A multidatabase transaction model for interbase. In: Proceedings of the sixteenth international conference on Very large databases, pp. 507–518. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc, San Francisco (1990)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Du, W., Davis, J., Shan, M.-C.: Flexible specification of workflow compensation scopes. In: Proceedings of the international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work: the integration challenge, pp. 309–316. ACM Press, New York (1997)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  16. Gaaloul, W., Baïna, K., Godart, C.: Towards mining structural workflow patterns. In: Andersen, K.V., Debenham, J.K., Wagner, R. (eds.) DEXA. LNCS, vol. 3588, pp. 24–33. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Gaaloul, W., Godart, C.: A workflow mining tool based on logs statistical analysis. In: Maurer, F., Ruhe, G. (eds.) SEKE, pp. 37–44 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Kiepuszewski, B., Muhlberger, R., Orlowska, M.E.: Flowback: providing backward recovery for workflow management systems. In: Proceedings of the 1998 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, pp. 555–557. ACM Press, New York (1998)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  19. Bhiri, S., Perrin, O., Godart, C.: Extending workflow patterns with transactional dependencies to define reliable composite web services. In: AICT/ICIW, p. 145. IEEE Computer Society (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  20. van der Aalst, W.M.P.: Exterminating the dynamic change bug: A concrete approach to support workflow change. Information Systems Frontiers 3(3), 297–317 (2001)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Basten, T., van der Aalst, W.M.P.: Inheritance of behavior. J. Log. Algebr. Program. 47(2), 47–145 (2001)

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  22. Jin, W.W., Rusinkiewicz, M., Ness, L., Sheth, A.: Concurrency control and recovery of multidatabase work flows in telecommunication applications. In: Proceedings of the 1993 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, pp. 456–459. ACM Press, New York (1993)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  23. Leymann, F.: Supporting business transactions via partial backward recovery in workflow management systems. In: Proceedings of BTW 1995, pp. 51–70. Springer, Heidelberg (1995)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Gaaloul, W., Bhiri, S., Godart, C.: Discovering workflow transactional behaviour event-based log. In: Meersman, R., Tari, Z. (eds.) OTM 2004. LNCS, vol. 3290, Springer, Heidelberg (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  25. van der Aalst, W.M.P., de Medeiros, A.K.A.: Process mining and security: Detecting anomalous process executions and checking process conformance. Electr. Notes Theor. Comput. Sci. 121, 3–21 (2005)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  26. Rozinat, A., van der Aalst, W.M.P.: Conformance testing: Measuring the fit and appropriateness of event logs and process models. In: Business Process Management Workshops, pp. 163–176 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Grigori, D., Casati, F., Castellanos, M., Dayal, U., Sayal, M., Shan, M.-C.: Business process intelligence. Comput. Ind. 53(3), 321–343 (2004)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. Baïna, K., Gaaloul, W., ElKhattabi, R., Mouhou, A.: A new workflow patterns and performance analysis tool. In: Dubois, E., Pohl, K. (eds.) CAiSE 2006. LNCS, vol. 4001, Springer, Heidelberg (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  29. Rouached, M., Gaaloul, W., van der Aalst, W.M.P., Bhiri, S., Godart, C.: Web service mining and verification of properties: An approach based on event calculus. In: Meersman, R., Tari, Z. (eds.) OTM 2006. LNCS, vol. 4275, pp. 408–425. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Christine Parent Klaus-Dieter Schewe Veda C. Storey Bernhard Thalheim

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Gaaloul, W., Bhiri, S., Haller, A. (2007). Mining and Re-engineering Transactional Workflows for Reliable Executions. In: Parent, C., Schewe, KD., Storey, V.C., Thalheim, B. (eds) Conceptual Modeling - ER 2007. ER 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4801. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75563-0_33

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75563-0_33

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-75562-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-75563-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics