Set-based access conflicts analysis of concurrent workflow definition

An error-comprising workflow definition might provoke serious problems to an enterprise, especially when it is involved with mission critical business processes. Concurrency of workflow processes is known as one of the major sources causing such an invalid workflow process definition. So, the conflicts caused by concurrent workflow processes should be considered deliberately when defining concurrent workflow processes. However, it is very difficult to ascertain whether a workflow process is free from conflicts or not without any experimental executions at runtime; this would be very tedious and time consuming work for process designers. If we can analyze the conflicts immanent in concurrent workflow definition prior to runtime, it would be very helpful to business process designers and many other users of workflow management systems. The authors propose a set-based constraint system to analyze possible read-write conflicts and write-write conflicts between activities which read and write to the shared variables in a workflow process definition. The system is composed of two phases. In the first phase, it generates set constraints from a structured workflow definition. In the second phase, it finds the minimal solution of the set constraints.