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Assignment III Workflows Suriyah M Roll No
Assignment III Workflows Suriyah M Roll No
WORKFLOWS
SURIYAH M
Roll no: 2009263008
I M.E., C.S.E (SPLN IN
KE&CL)
Data Flow and Validation in Workflow Modeling
Shazia Sadiq, Maria Orlowska, Wasim Sadiq, Cameron
Foulger
WORKFLOW :
The automation of a business process, in whole or part, during which documents,
information or tasks are passed from one participant* to another for action, according to a set of
procedural rules.
WORKFLOW MODELLING :
There are four aspects of workflow modeling. They are
• Structural aspects – consists study of order of execution of the component activities,
duration and deadline constraints etc.,
• Temporal aspects – temporal consistency is taken care of in this aspect
• Transactional aspects
• Functional aspects
Process verification is required to at least ensure that the resulting process model is
executable in the process management environment(syntactic verification). But syntactic
correctness of a process model does not indicate that it has captured the underlying business
requirements. Validation is needed for this purpose. Validation needs the knowledge of a
domain expert on the underlying business rules, business process logic and many types of local
constraints. Manual validation for any complex process model is complex and hard to achieve
accurately. The problem is that mostly the domain experts would not have expert knowledge in
process modeling.
Process validation :
Process design being checked against expected execution behavior, specification of data
requirements and data flow between process activities.
Validation of data aspects of work flow process is done after ensuring structural correctness. It
is a step in the process design cycle.
Possible causes of disrupted data flow :
Any additional component added to an existing structure may trigger a change in data
transfer.
Design shortcomings like missing data, data generated by an activity and not used by
the process, data available from inconsistent sources, date semantics and syntactic mismatch
may be identified during data validation.
Validation of workflow data :
It is difficult to capture flow of data in large, complex processes.
W – workflow model (a directed graph)
N – set of nodes
F – set of flows
Thus W = < N,F >. F is contained in N*N
Nodes can be Tasks T or Coordinators C.
such that ( C union T ) = NULL and ( C intersection T ) = NULL.
Task nodes are atomic manual / automated activities.
Coordinators allow us to build control flow structures to manage coordination
requirements of business process. An instance within the workflow graph represents a particular
case of the process.
The key requirements of any data flow mechanism in a workflow model are to have the
ability to
• Manage the data that is needed as input to and provided as output from activities in the
workflow model.
• Ensure that the data provided by any activity in the workflow model is available to other
activities in the workflow model that needed it.
• Provide mechanisms to ensure consistent flow of data from one activity to the other.
DATA MODEL REQUIREMENTS
• Type of data : The nature of the data with which an activity may deal with. Can be
structured, predefined data.
• Operational data ( O) : All data items that are needed by a particular activity.
• Reference data ( R ): Data that is used for the identification of the instance or case.
• Decision data ( D ): Subset of operational data used by choice coordinators to make
control decisions.
• Contextual data ( C ): It is of a complex structure, may or may not be predefined.
This may be required as input or may be generated as output.
INPUT = UNION { O, D, R, C }
• Sources of data
• Internal sources : The data items which can be found in Work flow data are
internal.
• External sources : Data which is available from any source other than the process
data store.
• Structure of the data
The data in the workflow system may be complex structures like images and
unstructured data like text documents. Each activity has an input schema and an output
schema, thus providing a means of dealing with complex data.
• Data validation problems
• Redundant data :
This occurs when the designer specifies data item(s) V in the output schema OS
of an activity. But this data is not required in the input schema of any activity.
• Lost data :
When the same data item V has been specified as the output of two or more
activities that may be executed in parallel. The activity responsible for the last update cannot be
established, which may cause a problem for activities that require that data item later in the
process.
• Missing data :
When a data item V has been specified in the input schema IS of an activity but
the source of the data item is unknown / not specified.
• Mismatched data :
This occurs when the structure of the data produced by the source is
incompatible with the structure required by the activity.
• Inconsistent data :
An activity retrieves a data item V from an application or human participant and
stores that item and its value in the process data store. This data may be read by another activity
later in time. There are chances for the data to be updated externally to the workflow system
from the time of retrieval to the time of reading.
This also occurs when different activities deal with multiple sources for the same
data item V at various times in the process.
• Misdirected data :
When data flow direction conflicts with the control flow in the same workflow
model, misdirected data problem occurs. The data flow determines the flow of data from
provider activities to receiver activities. A provider activity must always precede a receiver
activity in terms of control flow.
• Insufficient data :
This problem occurs when the data specified is insufficient to complete an
activity successfully.
• DATA FLOW IMPLEMENTATION MODELS
Explicit data flow :
The data flow transitions are explicitly defined as a part of the workflow model.
This models the flow of data from one activity to the other.
Begin A B C END
Implicit data flow through control flow:
This approach makes use of the control flow to pass data from one activity to
another.
Begin A B C END
Implicit data flow through process data store :
The process data store is basically a repository of process maintained data. All
the activities pass on their output data to the common process data store.
Process data store
Begin A B C END
Conclusion :
Thus the data flow validation issues in workflow modeling have been studied.