Petri Net Based Data-Flow Error Detection and Correction Strategy for Business Processes

Conceptual modeling, which includes both control-flow and data-flow modeling, has posed great challenges for conventional business process management systems. To support systematic data-flow modeling and analysis, in this paper, we propose a novel and effective Petri net-based approach. We first introduce a new type of Petri net, called WFIO-net, the firing rule of which is formally defined by extending classical Petri net with read and write semantics, to model both the control-flow and data-flow information. Then, we discuss about three possible data-flow errors over a WFIO-net, i.e., the missing, redundant and conflicting data errors. To detect such data-flow errors, we develop a polynomial complexity algorithm based on the so-called Activity Data Incidence Matrix (ADIM) of a WFIO-net. Following by that, we propose three effective correction strategies to resolve the detected data-flow anomalies. Finally, we present a property loan approval business process case study for our approach, and the study results demonstrate that the proposed detection and correction approaches are indeed very effective and can be applied to real-life settings.