Computation of Change Time for Migrate Dynamic Workflow Changes

A workflow is a flow of work supported by computers. An instance of a workflow is called case. Companies need to constantly refine their current workflows in order to meet various requirements. The change of current workflows is called dynamic change of the workflow. Since Ellis et al. proposed three change types, Flush, Abort, and Synthetic Cut-Over in 1995, various change types have been proposed. A promising change type is Migrate proposed by Sadiq et al., because Migrate changes workflow definitions immediately and makes the redo of cases minimum. However, the formal modeling and time-dependent analysis of Migrate has not been done. This paper proposes a method of computing change time of Migrate dynamic changes for time-dependent analysis. Change time is a measure for evaluating dynamic changes. We first show a Petri-nets-based model of Migrate dynamic changes. Then we present a method of computing change time based on the net model. Finally, we apply the method to 270 examples, and show experimental results, and comparison with Ellis et al..'s three change types.