Wolf-Pack Algorithm for Business Process Model Syntactic and Semantic Structure Verification in the Workflow Management Environment

Workflow management systems (WFMS) facilitate the routine operation of business processes and gain popularity in recent years. To ensure the correctness of business process specification and execution, model verification (especially structure verification) must be conducted so that we can identify any violations and consequently take proper action to remove them in time. However, little progress has been made on the perfect business process model syntactic and semantic structure verification in the workflow management environment, especially simple efficient algorithm is lack. In this paper, we present a biologically-inspired algorithm: Wolf-pack algorithm (WPA) for workflow syntactic and semantic structure verification. Our algorithm responds to distinguishing syntactic structure inconsistencies (such as deadlock, lack of synchronization, dead loop) and semantic structure inconsistencies (such as data source conflict) from workflow specification. Furthermore, we apply the algorithm to JTangFlow workflow management system and achieved good results.