Home // International Journal On Advances in Software, volume 2, number 1, 2009 // View article
Authors:
Osamu Takaki
Izumi Takeuti
Takahiro Seino
Noriaki Izumi
Koichi Takahashi
Keywords: workflow, verification, correctness, evidence life cycle, incremental verification
Abstract:
We investigate consistency properties of workflows from the perspectives of control flow and evidence life cycles for incremental verification for large-scale workflows. For modeling complicated business processes in developing large-scale information systems, it needs to develop largescale workflows that consist of a lot of small workflows. As a workflow becomes larger and larger, it becomes harder and harder to verify the workflow. Therefore, it is useful to verify large-scale workflows “incrementally”, that is, to verify small workflows before they are integrated to form the large-scale workflows. However, in order to verify a workflow incrementally, it is necessary to consider consistency properties of not only a whole workflow but also a subgraph of the whole workflow. Thus, we extend the correctness property of acyclic workflows to that of acyclic workflows with multiple starts and/or ends. Correctness of workflows is one of the most important consistency properties for improving workflow quality from the control flow perspective. Extended correctness is a natural extension of the original correctness property and is preserved in the vertical composition and vertical division of workflows. We also define a consistency property for evidence life cycles in workflows with multiple starts. Moreover, in order to validate the consistency properties above for incremental verification, we investigate real workflows and explain how to verify the consistency properties by using an example
Pages: 145 to 159
Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2009. Used with permission.
Publication date: June 7, 2009
Published in: journal
ISSN: 1942-2628