Workflow Refactoring for Maximizing Concurrency and Block-Structuredness

In the era of Internet and big data, contemporary workflows become increasingly large in scale and complex in structure, introducing greater challenges for workflow modeling. Workflows are not with maximized concurrency and block-structuredness in terms of control flow, though languages supporting block-structuredness (e.g., BPEL) are employed. Existing workflow refactoring approaches mostly focus on maximizing concurrency according to dependences between activities, but do not consider the block-structuredness of the refactored workflow. It is easier to comprehend and analyze a workflow that is block-structured and to transform it into BPEL-like processes. In this paper, we aim at maximizing both concurrency and block-structuredness. Nevertheless, not all workflows can be refactored with a block-structured representation, and it is intractable to make sure that the refactored workflows are as block-structured as possible. We first define a well-formed dependence pattern of activities. The control flow among the activities in this pattern can be represented in block-structured forms with maximized concurrency. Then, we propose a greedy heuristics-based graph reduction approach to recursively find such patterns. In this way, the resulting workflow is with maximized concurrency and its block-structuredness approximates optimality. We show the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach with real-world scientific workflows.

[1]  Carole A. Goble,et al.  The design and realisation of the myExperiment Virtual Research Environment for social sharing of workflows , 2009, Future Gener. Comput. Syst..

[2]  Hans-Arno Jacobsen,et al.  Process Discovery from Dependence-Complete Event Logs , 2016, IEEE Transactions on Services Computing.

[3]  Mathias Weske,et al.  Efficient Consistency Measurement Based on Behavioral Profiles of Process Models , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[4]  Jan Mendling,et al.  On the transformation of control flow between block-oriented and graph-oriented process modelling languages , 2008, Int. J. Bus. Process. Integr. Manag..

[5]  Vivek Sarkar,et al.  Decentralizing execution of composite web services , 2004, OOPSLA.

[6]  Akhil Kumar,et al.  An Analysis and Taxonomy of Unstructured Workflows , 2005, Business Process Management.

[7]  Francisco Curbera,et al.  Web Services Business Process Execution Language Version 2.0 , 2007 .

[8]  Daniela Grigori,et al.  Ranking BPEL Processes for Service Discovery , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Services Computing.

[9]  Amitava Bagchi,et al.  On Detecting Data Flow Errors in Workflows , 2010, JDIQ.

[10]  Doron Rotem,et al.  An Algorithm to Generate all Topological Sorting Arrangements , 1981, Computer/law journal.

[11]  Ethem Alpaydin,et al.  Introduction to machine learning , 2004, Adaptive computation and machine learning.

[12]  Cristina G. Fernandes,et al.  Maximum Series-Parallel Subgraph , 2009, WG.

[13]  Christoph Bussler,et al.  On Structured Workflow Modelling , 2000, CAiSE.

[14]  Ivar Jacobson,et al.  The unified modeling language user guide - covers UML 2.0, Second Edition , 2005, Addison Wesley object technology series.

[15]  Maria E. Orlowska,et al.  Analyzing Process Models Using Graph Reduction Techniques , 2000, Inf. Syst..

[16]  Stephen A. White,et al.  Using BPMN to Model a BPEL Process , 2005 .

[17]  Alfred V. Aho,et al.  The Transitive Reduction of a Directed Graph , 1972, SIAM J. Comput..

[18]  Jan Mendling,et al.  Seven process modeling guidelines (7PMG) , 2010, Inf. Softw. Technol..

[19]  Abhishek Ranjan,et al.  An Empirical Study of Error Patterns in Industrial Business Process Models , 2014, IEEE Transactions on Services Computing.

[20]  Keqing He,et al.  Service Restructuring by Choreography-Driven Equivalence , 2012, 2012 IEEE Ninth International Conference on Services Computing.

[21]  Wil M. P. van der Aalst,et al.  Data-Flow Anti-patterns: Discovering Data-Flow Errors in Workflows , 2009, CAiSE.

[22]  Jan Mendling,et al.  From business process models to process-oriented software systems , 2009, TSEM.

[23]  Shing-Chi Cheung,et al.  Refactoring and Publishing WS-BPEL Processes to Obtain More Partners , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Conference on Web Services.

[24]  Ahmed Nazeem,et al.  On the Optimal Petri Net Representation for Service Composition , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Conference on Web Services.

[25]  Wolfgang Reisig,et al.  The Synthesis Problem , 2021, Trans. Petri Nets Other Model. Concurr..

[26]  J. Hopcroft,et al.  Efficient algorithms for graph manipulation , 1971 .

[27]  Hans-Arno Jacobsen,et al.  Static and Dynamic Process Change , 2018, IEEE Transactions on Services Computing.

[28]  Mathias Weske,et al.  Maximal Structuring of Acyclic Process Models , 2011, Comput. J..

[29]  Margaret Mitchell,et al.  Creating Minimal Vertex Series Parallel Graphs from Directed Acyclic Graphs , 2004, InVis.au.

[30]  Hans-Arno Jacobsen,et al.  An Empirical Study on Data Flow Bugs in Business Processes , 2021, IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing.

[31]  Matjaz B. Juric,et al.  An Empirical Analysis of Business Process Execution Language Usage , 2014, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[32]  Leizhen Cai,et al.  On the SPANNING k-Tree Problem , 1993, Discret. Appl. Math..

[33]  Hans-Arno Jacobsen,et al.  Scientific Workflow Mining in Clouds , 2017, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems.

[34]  Joe D. Warren,et al.  The program dependence graph and its use in optimization , 1984, TOPL.

[35]  Wil M. P. van der Aalst,et al.  Workflow mining: discovering process models from event logs , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.

[36]  Walid Gaaloul,et al.  Scientific Workflow Clustering and Recommendation Leveraging Layer Hierarchical Analysis , 2018, IEEE Transactions on Services Computing.

[37]  Marlon Dumas,et al.  Split Miner: Discovering Accurate and Simple Business Process Models from Event Logs , 2017, 2017 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM).

[38]  Tao Xie,et al.  Detecting Concurrency-Related Problematic Activity Arrangement in WS-BPEL Programs , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Conference on Services Computing.

[39]  Tao Jin,et al.  Refactor Business Process Models with Maximized Parallelism , 2016, IEEE Transactions on Services Computing.