A Conceptual Transformation Formalism of Workflow Control-Flow Classification Automata

Abstract

In recent, a new concept of workflow mining is becoming one of the main research issues in the workflow management literature. It is able to discover a variety of valuable knowledge reflecting the process-centered perspectives in workflow-supported organizations. In particular, finding control-flow paths is a very important functionality in terms of analyzing the process-centered perspectives in a workflow model as well as evaluating their performances in a series of enactment traces and logs of the corresponding workflow model. In this paper, we describe a conceptual formalism for transforming workflow models to their control-flow classification automata. A control-flow classification automaton transformed from a specific workflow model plays a decisive role in implementing an efficient approach to generate all possible sequences of control-flow paths from the corresponding workflow model. It also can be eventually used as control-flow classification filters on workflow enactment traces and logs.