In a globalized economic environment with volatile business requirements, continuous process improvement needs to be done regularly in various organizations. However, maintaining the consistency of workflow models under frequent changes is a significant challenge in the management of corporate information services. Unfortunately, few formal approaches are found in the literature for managing workflow changes systematically. In this paper, we propose an analytical framework for workflow change management through formal modeling of workflow constraints, leading to an approach called Constraint-centric Workflow Change Analytics (CWCA). A core component of CWCA is the formal definition and analysis of workflow change anomalies. We operationalize CWCA by developing a change anomaly detection algorithm and validate it in the context of procurement management. A prototype system based on an open-source rule engine is presented to provide a proof-of-concept implementation of CWCA.
To be competitive in the global market, companies need to quickly adapt their business processes to various changes in the business environment, such as mergers/acquisitions, new regulations, and new customer demand. Various changes can occur in different workflow perspectives including control flow, data flow, organizational model, and workflow constraints. For instance, process reengineering or supply chain reconfiguration can lead to the alteration of task execution sequences and removal of non-value-added tasks, i.e. control flow changes. Mergers/acquisitions can result in resource reallocation and organization restructuring, i.e. organizational model changes. New governmental regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act may require new and revised business rules to be compliant, i.e. workflow constraint changes.
Existing research on workflow changes tends to focus on a limited number of perspectives of workflow, mostly control flow and data flow, paying little attention to dependencies among all workflow perspectives [13], [15], [22], [29], [40], [44], [45] and [53]. For example, industrial reorganization such as mergers/acquisitions may result in removing certain organizational roles, i.e. an organizational model change. Consequently, tasks assigned to those roles must be delegated to other resources, and the relevant workflow constraints must be revised properly; otherwise, a runtime role resolution error might occur and the corresponding tasks will not be executed. Given these frequent changes in business workflows, managing multi-perspective workflow changes is imperative in order to support business operations and continuous process improvement efficiently.
Many process modeling specifications have been used in practice, such as UML activity diagrams, BPMN, and Event-driven Process Chains (EPCs), but these specifications usually lack analytical capability and therefore cannot be used to formally model and analyze workflow changes. Formal languages have been applied to model workflows, such as Petri nets [1], [34] and [52], Metagraphs [5], Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) [58], formal logic [10] and [21], and PI Calculus [46]. In addition, several rule languages have been applied to analyze workflow constraints and specify workflow exceptions [9], [13], [14] and [15]. Nevertheless, little research is found on formal approaches that focus on workflow change analysis treating a workflow system as a whole.
In this paper, we aim to fill this research gap by proposing an analytical framework for managing multi-perspective workflow changes via formal modeling of workflow constraints, referred to as Constraint-centric Workflow Change Analytics (CWCA). The contributions of this paper are as follows. First, we propose a novel constraint-centric approach to analyzing multi-perspective workflow changes by specifying workflow change operations and dependencies formally. Second, we apply First Order Logic to formally define workflow change anomalies and develop an algorithm to detect those anomalies. Third, we validate the CWCA framework through a prototype system that provides insights into the integration of CWCA with existing workflow management systems and rule engines.
The rest of the paper proceeds as follows. We first review the relevant literature in Section 2. Then, we discuss the types of workflow changes and their dependencies in Section 3. In Section 4, we present a procurement process as a running case for the paper and propose a constraint-centric workflow modeling framework to specify different workflow perspectives for formal workflow change analysis. In Section 5, we formally define and analyze workflow change anomalies and develop an anomaly detection method. A proof-of-concept system is also presented to demonstrate CWCA and validate the anomaly detection algorithm. We compare our framework with some other related approaches and discuss its limitations in Section 6. Finally, we conclude in Section 7 by summarizing our contributions.
In order to support continuous process improvement systematically, there is a critical need to manage workflow changes more rigorously. In this paper, we presented a constraint-centric analytical approach for managing workflow changes, named Constraint-centric Workflow Change Analytics (CWCA). CWCA advocates a unified view of workflow changes based on workflow constraint analysis and enables a comprehensive representation of multiple workflow perspectives for the purpose of detecting workflow change anomalies. More specifically, multi-perspective workflow change anomalies are formally defined and classified into four categories, namely, missing, redundant, defective, and conflicting anomalies. In order to validate the CWCA approach, we developed an anomaly detection algorithm and a proof-of-concept system using a rule-based approach. Our research fills a critical void in workflow change management and has significant impact on continuous process improvement and workflow management. The CWCA approach presented in this paper has some unique features and innovations compared with the existing body of work on workflow modeling and change management. At the same time, CWCA has great potential for future extensions and refinements to provide more utility for workflow change management.
