Transforming YAWL Workflows with Time Interval Constraints into Timed Automata

Abstract

YAWL is one of the modern business process workflows. It provides the visualization of easy-to-understand the workflows of business tasks with the single fixed time delay. In this paper, the ordinary YAWL would be extended by adding the time interval constraints attaching to each task symbols in the YAWL workflows. By mean of the time interval constraints, the labels of both lower bound and upper bound of the time delays are assigned to each business tasks in the workflow to cope with more complicated problems of time efficiency in business process workflows. As to simulate the behaviors of the proposed YAWL workflows with time interval constraints, it would be converted into the corresponding timed automata and simulated using the UPPAAL simulation tool. In this paper, a set of transformation rules is proposed to guide the mapping template of YAWL symbols and its time interval constraints into timed automata syntaxes. The resulting timed automata are correctly converted and simulated using UPPAAL simulation tool.