Evaluation Method of Change Time for Migrate Dynamic Workflow Changes

A workflow is a business process automated by computers. The instance of workflow is called case. Companies need to refine their current workflows in orderto adapt them to meet various requirements. The change of a current workflow is called dynanric change of the workflow. E,llis et al. have proposed three change types, Flush, Abort, and Synthetic Cut-Over (SCO) , in I 995. As a remarkable change type, Sadiq et al. has proposed Migyate. Migrate is a change type that changes the workflow definition immediatell. and minimizes the reprocessing of cases. A workflow can be modeled as a Petri net, called workflow net. The workflow net model ofMigrate has been proposed. Furthermore the method oftransferring cases from an old workflow to a new workflow is also proposed. In this paper, we are to do the performance evaluatton on change time for dynamic changes of various and complex workflow nets by Migrate. Change time is a measure for evaluating dynamic changes quantitatively. We first propose operations to change workflow nets, called change-operations, a method of generating various and complex workflow nets by usi ng the change-operations. Then we propose a method of computing change time for dynamic changes by Migrate. Applying the computation method, we do the performance evaluation on change time for dynamic changes of 270 generated workflow nets by Migrate. Furthermore we compare Migrate with Ellis et al.'s three change fypes.