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Research On The Theory Of Workflow Modeling And Analysis Supporting Business Process Management

Posted on:2005-05-05Degree:DoctorType:Dissertation
Country:ChinaCandidate:H P ZhuFull Text:PDF
GTID:1119360182469274Subject:Mechanical and electrical engineering
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
Business process management (BPM), as a new research field originating from workflow management, aims at supporting and managing business processes entirely by using lots of new methods, techniques and workflow software to design, enact, control and analyze practical operational processes involving humans, organizations, enterprise applications, business objects and other sources of information, etc. It centers on enterprise processes and remarkably heightens process management to a level higher than that of information management. Nowadays, in the construction course of enterprise information platforms, several problems such as organization bulwark, information isolation, slow market response speed and long non-value-added activity time can only be solved through efficient process management. Due to the urgent need for BPM and the weakness in BPM modeling and analysis, this dissertation focuses on BPM theory architecture, BPM modeling methods and performance analysis technologies after a review of the related work and the definition of BPM related concepts and enabled technologies. Firstly, the methodology of BPM is discussed and a three-dimensional framework model based on the whole lifecycle and multi-views is put forward. In the first dimension, BPM is regarded as a whole lifecycle including several phases such as process design, definition, enactment, mining and optimization. In different phases, different tasks should be dealt with and different outputs should be produced. In the second dimension, due to the different viewpoints of persons at different enterprise level, BPM is regarded as a multi-views system consisting of goal view, process view and organization view, where the process view and organization view are influenced and enhanced each other. In the third dimension, BPM is regarded as an application system which can be successfully implemented only under the guide of reasonable strategies and regulations and with the support of advanced technologies. Secondly, the complex workflow modeling theory of a class of enterprise business processes with multi-levels, multi-dependencies and higher flexibility is deeply studied. After the analysis of the practical requirements to complex workflow, the idea of workflow configuration analogous to product configuration theory is proposed, that is, by using the mechanism of task version configuration, the non-precise generic model in build time can be mapped into the needed precise workflow model in running time. In order to exactly describe complex task state dependencies and then verify, Hierarchical Colored Petri Net is introduced into complex workflow modeling. Based on the task concept model, Colored Petri Nets are used to model task interface, control dependencies, workflow patterns and composite task versions. Thus Hierarchical Task State Net is formed through place refining mechanism. Also being a practical example of complex workflow, the engineering change process is demonstrated. Thirdly, organization modeling and access control modeling in BPM are studied. An object-oriented organizational meta-model that supports the description of both functional and project organizational structure is built. In order to guarantee the validity of organization, Object Constraint Language is used to formally describe the organizational constraints, and the integration approach of organizational model and process model is presented. After the analysis of access control context in BPM system, four basic access control principles are summarized, and then a new access control model, Activity & Context-constraint-Based Access Control, is proposed where several rules are formally described by seven types of predications. Fourthly, an in-depth study on the problem of business process performance analysis spanning multi-lifecycle phases in BPM is done from three aspects: time management, performance computation and simulation analysis. On time management, timing constraints are classified in detail and then modeled with time-constrainted Petri net, which facilitates the verification of scheduling consistency through the static and dynamic algorithms. On performance computation, the theories on Markov Chain, Queue and Stochastic Petri Net are introduced to perform quantitative computation to get the time and resource indicators for the Generalized Stochastic Workflow Net. Next a formula about the calculation of the average execution time of workflow is deduced. As this approach of direct calculation has the weakness of excessive calculational complexity, an approach to performance equivalent simplification and analysis of Generalized Stochastic Workflow Net is presented. Research on resource allocation policy is composed of two parts. One is about how to allocate sufficient number of resources to each task and count the least resource number to ensure some timeing constraints. The other is about the optimization of new resource allocation. In this dissertation, an approach based on critical activity is proposed. Also the algorithm and practical example are demonstrated. On simulation analysis, the ExSpect tool serves as the basic simulation platform, on which simulation models are constructed, simulation technologies are studied and two types of simulation analysis, that is, under the assumption of unlimited resources or under the constraint of limited resources, are researched. Simulation analysis is an effective method to solve the problem of high calculational complexity and rigorous restrictive rules. Then, a BPM prototype system designed and developed for this dissertation is introduced from several aspects including requirement definition, system design principles, system architecture, data models and main functional modules. Finally, a conclusion is drawn and the trend on business process management is anticipated.
Keywords/Search Tags:business process management, workflow, business process modeling, organization modeling, performance analysis, Petri net
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