Designing software for operational decision support through coloured Petri nets

• Published in: Enterprise information systems Vol. 11; no. 5; pp. 576 - 596
• Main Authors: Maggi, F.M., Westergaard, M.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Taylor & Francis 28.05.2017
• Subjects: business process monitoring; Coloured Petri nets; Computer programs; Decision support systems; Handles; Information systems; Infrastructure; model-driven design; operational support; Petri nets; Queries; Software; state space analysis
• ISSN: 1751-7575; 1751-7583
• DOI: 10.1080/17517575.2015.1067723

Operational support provides, during the execution of a business process, replies to questions such as 'how do I end the execution of the process in the cheapest way?' and 'is my execution compliant with some expected behaviour?' These questions may be asked several times during a single execution and, to answer them, dedicated software components (the so-called operational support providers) need to be invoked. Therefore, an infrastructure is needed to handle multiple providers, maintain data between queries about the same execution and discard information when it is no longer needed. In this paper, we use coloured Petri nets (CPNs) to model and analyse software implementing such an infrastructure. This analysis is needed to clarify the requirements before implementation and to guarantee that the resulting software is correct. To this aim, we present techniques to represent and analyse state spaces with 250 million states on a normal PC. We show how the specified requirements have been implemented as a plug-in of the process mining tool ProM and how the operational support in ProM can be used in combination with an existing operational support provider.