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This paper focuses on the behavior similarity of workflow nets (WF-nets). The similarity of two WF-nets reflects their consistent degree in behaviors. It explores the behavioral relations of subsets of transitions based on the interleaving semantics, and more accurate relations are defined than the existing work. Therefore, a more accurate similarity of two WF-nets (in their behaviors) can be obtained than that in the existing work that usually do not consider the loop and complex correspondence. By refining the interleaving relation in a behavioral profile into six types, this paper proposes the notion of a relation profile based on behavioral profile. Based on the relation profile of a WF-net, behavioral relation matrix can be constructed. Additionally, we refine the complex correspondence and generate a group of behavioral relation submatrices from the behavioral relation matrix. By using them we present a new formula to measure the behavior similarity of two WF-nets. Finally, examples illustrate that our method can measure the similarity degree more accurately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The e-commerce business process net (EBPN) is a novel formal model for describing an e-commerce system and its interactive parts, such as shoppers, merchants, and the third-party payment platforms. Vulnerability analysis has a great impact on the trustworthiness of EBPN, which is an issue stemming from data inconsistency problems. Data inconsistency problems affect the consistency of the EBPN transaction analysis. The underlying causes of inconsistent data are closely related to concurrent operations, such as control flow and data flow. However, most of the existing detection methods have difficulties characterizing the vulnerabilities and interactions of control and data flows. In this paper, we propose a new method based on the dynamic data slice (DDS) that considers both transaction consistency and data state consistency. First, by analyzing control flow characteristics of EBPN, we obtain the dynamic slice. This dynamic slice is based on all paths of the EBPN reachability graph. Second, we perform the data inconsistency analysis by considering both transaction consistency and data-state consistency. Based on these, we construct a DDS to characterize the behavioral logic and the data-dependence information. The DDS acquires the dynamic data firing sequence. Based on that sequence and a given data marking, we can construct the DDSs for several types of EBPNs. Constructing the DDS can be completed in polynomial time. The DDS is designed to characterize the behavioral logic and data-dependence information. Based on these, we design a method to judge the data constraints. This method satisfies the EBPN need for transaction consistency by considering both the control and data states. In addition, according to the data-dependence information, we can lock the vulnerable regions caused by abnormal trading data in the system. Finally, we give a method to compute the vulnerability level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the transformation of Internet of Things to Web of Things (WoT), a variety of applications are required to deal with huge volumes of real-time and heterogeneous data. However, in most applications, due to the weak semantics of data itself and the loose combination with specific scenarios, it is sometimes difficult to depict the spatiotemporal feature of the scenario in an application only through the data. In this paper, a spatiotemporal semantic scenario meta-model-based configurable platform is proposed for the development of WoT applications to address this issue, based on the data configuration, event stream configuration, and service encapsulation, the entire WoT scenario can be depicted with an abstract data model and related rules, and the business process can be changed by redefining corresponding rules when requirements change. A case study is given to verify the feasibility of our platform. The result shows that the platform can provide background support for WoT applications in a promising way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Workflow technology has emerged as one of the leading technologies in modeling, redesigning, and executing business processes in several different application domains. Among them, the representation and management of health and clinical processes have been attracting a growing interest. Such processes are in general related to the way each health organization provides the required healthcare services. Health and clinical processes underlie the specification and application of clinical protocols, clinical guidelines, clinical pathways, and the most common clinical/administrative procedures. Current workflow systems are lacking in effective management of three general key aspects that are common (not only) in the clinical/health context: data dependencies, exception handling, and temporal constraints. For example, a laparoscopic intervention may need the results of the concurrent bioptic analysis to be properly concluded while exceptional recovery activities have to be performed in case of emergency evidence during standard treatment; however, the successful application of a fibrinolytic therapy requires a maximum delay of 30 min after the admission into the emergency department. In this paper, we propose TNest, a new advanced, structured, and highly modular workflow modeling language that allows one to easily express data dependencies and time constraints during process design, in addition to exception handling and compensation activities. As for temporal constraints, we focus here on temporal controllability which is the capability of executing a workflow for all possible durations of all tasks satisfying all temporal constraints. Moreover, we analyze the computational complexity of the temporal controllability problem in TNest, and we propose a general algorithm to check the controllability. All the features of TNest that have been considered to model clinical pathways from classical clinical guidelines, i.e., those features for the management of STEMI patients, published by the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association, will be used throughout the paper as a motivating scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interoperability is the capability of multiple parties and systems to collaborate and exchange information and matter to obtain their objectives. Interoperability challenges call for a model-based systems engineering approach. This paper describes a conceptual modeling framework for model-based interoperability engineering (MoBIE) for systems of systems, which integrates multilayered interoperability specification, modeling, architecting, design, and testing. Treating interoperability infrastructure as a system in its own right, MoBIE facilitates interoperability among agents, processes, systems, services, and interfaces. MoBIE is founded on ISO 19450 standard—object-process methodology, a holistic paradigm for modeling and architecting complex, dynamic, and multidisciplinary systems—and allows for synergistic integration of the interoperability model with system-centric models. We also discuss the implementation of MoBIE with the unified modeling language. We discuss the importance of interoperability in the civil aviation domain, and apply MoBIE to analyze the passenger departure process in an airport terminal as a case-in-point. The resulting model enables architectural and operational decision making and analysis at the system-of-systems level and adds significant value at the interoperability engineering program level. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

E-commerce business process nets (EBPNs) are a novel formal model for describing and validating e-commerce systems including interactive parties such as shopper, merchant, and third-party payment platform. Data errors and nondeterminacy of the data states during the trading process can be depicted with the help of EBPNs. However, the problem about how to analyze EBPNs remains largely open. To analyze their data-liveness, data-boundedness, and reachability, this paper presents two analysis methods. For EBPNs, reachability analysis is proposed based on a 3-D incidence matrix method. Additionally, reduction methods are proposed for a special EBPN. Finally, the validity and reliability of the proposed methods are illustrated via the examples of e-commerce systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper proposes a Semantic Web-based context ontological reasoning service for multimedia conferencing process management. When the chairman enters the basic conference information, the process will automatically select the appropriate means of notifications based on the conference time and the participant contact details. In this system, all types of multimedia conferencing processes are encapsulated in Web services and deployed on an enterprise service bus. A large multimedia conference ontology is created that contains business rules. In addition, with the objective of improving and management for data redundancy in ontological reasoning service, we propose an extensible breadth-first-search-based graph search algorithm that can successfully eliminate the redundant portion of the ontology, which can ensure validity of context ontology reasoning. Finally, the proposed multimedia conferencing process management can obtain the desired results, and some corresponding experimental analysis are reported. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the process of scheduling multiple generating units, an up/down decision for every generating unit has to be made for every hour on the planning horizon. Once the unit commitment is decided for every generating unit, a generation level (economic dispatch) from the committed unit is calculated to minimize the total operation cost. Such a problem is known as a unit commitment problem (UCP). Because an up/down pattern is expressed with a vector of binary variables, one has to solve a combinatorial optimization problem. Due to electricity liberalization or the introduction of distributed power sources in recent years, the need to solve the UCP by autonomous distributed agents, that is, solving distributed UCP (DUCP), comes about. This paper proposes a method of solving the DUCP with a Walrasian auction. The main feature of the proposed method is that not only a generation-level pattern but also an up/down pattern can be determined. The results of computational experiments show that the DUCP is solved through the cooperation of autonomous distributed agents by using the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

van der Aalst et al. proved that the soundness problem is solvable in polynomial time for free-choice workflow nets (FCWF-nets). However, FCWF-nets cannot model most web services composition and interorganizational business processes because the interaction among processes does not usually satisfy the free-choice requirement. Asymmetric-choice workflow nets (ACWF-nets) as a larger class than FCWF-nets can model lots of such cases. Our previous work showed that the (weak) soundness problem is co-NP-hard for three-bounded ACWF-nets. Later, Tiplea et al. proved that for three-bounded acyclic ACWF-nets, the weak soundness problem is co-NP-complete. We sharp these results in this paper. First, we prove that for ACWF-nets, whether they are one-bounded or k -bounded ( k~\boldsymbol > 1 ), the soundness problem is co-NP-hard. Second, it is proven that the soundness is equivalent to the weak soundness for any acyclic ACWF-nets, i.e., an acyclic ACWF-net is sound if and only if it is weakly sound. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, cross-department business processes are becoming more and more complex. Different kinds of coordination patterns exist among different departments, which make modeling and analysis work more difficult. To our best knowledge, there is no formal method to give systematic modeling and verification for the cross-department processes when considering different kinds of coordination patterns among different departments. This paper proposes such a method based on Petri nets. The WF-net model extended with resource and message factors, RM_WF_Net for short, is first introduced. Then, the formal model of tasks is proposed and its coordination relations are given. Next, RM_WF_Net modeling for intradepartment processes is investigated and cross-department coordination patterns, including message interaction pattern, resource interaction pattern, task collaboration pattern, procedure abstract, service outsourcing pattern, and process activation pattern, are formally defined. The soundness of the RM_WF_Net is verified based on the reachability graph. A running case of the cross-department medical diagnosis business process is given to validate our proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The creation of value-added services by automatic composition of existing ones is gaining significant momentum as the potential silver bullet in service-oriented computing. A large number of composition methods have been proposed, and most of them are based on the matching of input and output parameters of services only. However, most services in the real world are not universally applicable, and some applicable conditions or restrictions are imposed on them by their providers. Such constraints have a great impact on service composition, but have been largely ignored by the existing methods. In this paper, they are discussed and defined, and a simple formal expression is adopted to describe them. Two novel concepts, called service intension and service extension, are presented, which allow one to divide the basic elements of a web service definition into two parts. Consequently, their use allows us to propose a constraint-aware service composition method in which service constraints are well taken care. The proposed solution includes a graph search-based algorithm and two novel preprocessing methods. A publicly available test set from ICEBE05 is used to evaluate and analyze the proposed methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Petri nets are suitable for modeling and analysis of business processes. However, the lack of data concepts often makes Petri-net-based models excessively large and difficult to analyze especially when process logic is sensitive to changes of process attribute values. Emergency treatment processes are a typical example of this situation. To solve the aforementioned problems, this paper proposes a new hierarchical Petri net model for modeling and verification of emergency treatment processes. The hierarchical Petri net model includes three separate but closely related models, i.e., a business process logic net, a business process semantic net, and a set of case models. Business process logic nets are used to model the task dependencies disregarding semantic information. Business process semantic nets introduce data concepts to business process logic nets to model semantic information such as process attributes or conditions of sequence flows. Case models are used to model the practical routes of specific business instances. Based on the three models, a formal verification algorithm of an emergency treatment process is presented. Finally, the hierarchical modeling and verification methods are validated by an emergency treatment process of highways under snow/ice weather conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]