Workflow Conformance Checking
This procedure gives the answer on the following questions
- does our model conform to what actually happens?
- does what actually happens conform to the model?
- should we change our workflow to better fit the reality?
So it’s
- what actually happens vs
- what we think happens
Play In
Suppose we have some logs that were captured during the process execution
- we can ‘'’play in’’’ these sequences of actions on the model
- and see if any of them fails
- if yes - then we have no conformance
This is very helpful in
- finding tasks that are not automated and performed outside of the engine
- (sometimes we turn off the workflow engine and add some exceptional cases manually)
- are there lots of these exceptions? then we should add them to the model
Simulation (Play Out)
We can try to simulate the execution of our model
- to see what can change if we add or remove something
- are there any bottlenecks that have appeared after the change?
To do this we need to define the environment of execution
- need to have the process itself
- for each activity
- times and priorities
- statistics on how often a certain branch is followed
- frequency of incoming cases
- the number of resources that can handle the cases
So given the statistics
- a some kind of random walk process is executed
- it basically traverses the Reachability Graph of a model
- and emulates the delays, etc
After the execution we can see:
- avg execution time
- resource utilization
- etc