Safety Analysis and Performance Evaluation of Time WF-nets

Time management in workflow systems is crucial in determining and controlling the life cycle of a workflow process. Research on time modeling and analysis is important to guarantee workflow plans to be efficiently implemented and to make enterprises more competitive. Time WF-nets derived from time Petri nets and WF-nets are an effective model for workflow time management. In this paper, considering multiple instances of one workflow model run concurrently, we concern how to determine the workflow instance arrival cycle in order to make the waiting time of each instance as short as possible. Meanwhile the safety property of Time WF-nets is preserved. The key contribution of our work is twofold. First, instance arrival cycle is calculated in order to satisfy the safety property of Time WF-nets. Second, performance evaluation for Time WF-nets is proposed, which is based on instance arrival cycle and instance throughput cycle derived from safety analysis.