van Km Kees Hee

Soundness of workflow nets: classification, decidability, and analysis

Workflow nets, a particular class of Petri nets, have become one of the standard ways to model and analyze workflows. Typically, they are used as an abstraction of the workflow that is used to check the so-called soundness property. This property guarantees the absence of livelocks, deadlocks, and other anomalies that can be detected without domain knowledge. Several authors have proposed alternative notions of soundness and have suggested to use more expressive languages, e.g., models with cancellations or priorities. This paper provides an overview of the different notions of soundness and investigates these in the presence of different extensions of workflow nets. We will show that the eight soundness notions described in the literature are decidable for workflow nets. However, most extensions will make all of these notions undecidable. These new results show the theoretical limits of workflow verification. Moreover, we discuss some of the analysis approaches described in the literature.

Business process redesign: a Petri-net-based approach

Abstract Reengineering business processes seems to be a necessity in order to survive and prosper in todays competitive world. To support business process reengineering (BPR) efforts, we propose a framework based on high-level Petri nets. This framework is used to model and analyse business processes. The use of high-level Petri nets provides us with advanced analysis techniques and sophisticated software tools. To support the use of this Petri-net-based framework, we also present the “What, how and by whom?” approach. This approach has been developed to guide the application of the framework in a BPR setting. The “What, how and by whom?” approach identifies three important stages in the (re)design of a business process. By passing through these stages we obtain a complete Petri net model of the current (As-is) or proposed (To-be) situation, whereupon Petri-net-based analysis techniques can be used to verify the correctness and estimate the performance of the (re)designed business process.

Auditing 2.0: Using Process Mining to Support Tomorrow's Auditor

Auditors validate information about organizations and their business processes. Reliable information is needed to determine whether these processes are executed within certain boundaries set by managers, governments, and other stakeholders. Violations of specific rules enforced by law or company policies may indicate fraud, malpractice, risks, or inefficiencies. Traditionally, an audit can only provide reasonable assurance that business processes are executed within the given set of boundaries. Auditors assess the operating effectiveness of process controls, and when these controls are not in place or functioning as expected, they typically check samples of factual data. However, with detailed information about processes increasingly available in high-quality event logs, auditors no longer have to rely on a small set of samples offline. Instead, using process mining techniques, they can evaluate all events in a business process, and do so while it is still running. The omnipresence of electronically recorded business events coupled with process mining technology enable a new form of auditing that will dramatically change the role of auditors: Auditing 2.0.

Decision support system for container terminal planning

In this paper we describe a decision support system for capacity planning of container terminals. Typical elements of a container terminal are a quay, cranes,a stack yard and trucks for transport of containers between the quay and the stack yard and vice versa. For each of these elements we can devise models to describe the performance. The decision support system combined a heuristic analysis of these models to a global model to study the interaction between the elements of a container terminal.

Resource-constrained project scheduling: an international exercise in DSS development

The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria, coordinates an international exercise in the development of decision support systems. The participants will independently develop a number of interactive planning systems for resource-constrained project scheduling, in the hope of generating knowledge and experience in the design, analysis and implementation of decision support systems. This note specifies the rules of the exercise.

PORTPLAN, decision support system for port terminals

Abstract Models underlying a decision support system (dss) for port terminal planning are described. Among others Markov models, queuing models and simple optimization models are considered. The integration of different models, each describing specific aspects of a decision situation, is one of the major problems in the development of a dss. This paper gives a good insight in this problem field. The paper gives also some theoretical results related to some models that might be interesting in other contexts.

Yasper: a tool for workflow modeling and analysis

This paper presents Yasper, a tool for modeling, analyzing and simulating workflow systems, based on Petri nets. Yasper puts Petri net modeling in the hands of business analysts and software architecture designers. They can specify systems in familiar terms (XOR choice, workflow, cases, roles, processing time and cost), and can directly run manual and automatic simulations on the resulting models to analyze correctness and performance. Yasper was designed to cooperate with other tools, such as Petri net analyzers, and off-the-shelf software for data (color) handling and forms handling

A modeling environment for decision support systems

We describe a formal framework for modeling and prototyping complex systems. Our framework consists of a meta-model for discrete event systems, a language based upon this meta-model and a software environment for editing and validating system descriptions. The possibilities for using our framework for decision support systems are indicated and illustrated by a job shop planning example.

Markov decision processes and strongly excessive functions

Strongly excessive functions play an important role in the theory of Markov decision processes and Markov games. In this paper the following question is investigated: What are the properties of Markov decision processes which possess a strongly excessive function? A probabilistic characterization is presented in the form of a random drift through a partitioned state space. For strongly excessive functions which have a positive lower bound a characterization is given in terms of the lifetime distribution of the process. Finally we give a characterization in terms of the spectral radius.

Modeling of discrete dynamic systems

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