Performance modeling and analysis of workflow

Abstract

Workflow model analysis is performed at logic, temporal, and performance levels. This paper mainly deals with the performance level issues. Workflow net (WF-net) is extended with time information to the timing workflow net (TWF-net). To provide a formal framework for modeling and analyzing workflow, this paper proposes a multidimension workflow net (MWF-net) that include multiple TWF-nets and the organization and resource information. The algorithm to decompose a free-choice and acyclic Petri nets (PN) into a set of T-components is extended to a TWF-net containing iteration structures. Then, resource availability and workload analysis is performed. A method for computing the lower bound of average turnaround time of transaction instances processed in a MWF-net is proposed. Finally a case study is used to show that the proposed method can be effectively utilized in practice.