A New Method for Measuring the Behavioral Consistency Degree of WF-Net Systems

Abstract

How to guarantee the consistency between different systems has become a bone of contention in model-driven software development. Behavioral relations are a prominent technique/method to analyze the consistency degree of two workflow systems. There are four kinds of behavioral relations, i.e., strict order relation, exclusiveness relation, interleaving order relation, and inverse order relation. An activity in a module may be in different behavioral relations with activities in another module. We call the latter module a <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">special module</i> in this article. However, the existing measuring methods for behavioral consistency do not consider special modules at all. Thus, if we conduct a consistency analysis of different systems by these methods, we may get an inaccurate consistency degree, or obtain no results. In order to solve this problem, we use workflow nets (WF-nets) to model workflow systems and re-explore their behavioral relations. Then, their behavioral relation matrices (BRMs) are constructed. Based on BRMs, some new measurement methods are proposed to calculate the behavioral consistency degree of two WF-net systems. Finally, a group of experiments is done to show the effectiveness of our methods.