Resource-Oriented Timed Workflow Nets and Simulation Tool Design

This paper introduces resource-oriented timed workflow nets (ROTWNs), a type of Petri nets extended with resources and timing specifications. ROTWNs are designed to facilitate the analysis of the resource requirements in business workflow, as well as the timespan of the process. The analysis of ROTWN models is presented. Due to the nature of concurrency of business processes, state explosion is a common issue that makes it hard to find analytical solutions to ROTWN models, and thus it is necessary to automate the analysis through simulation. The design of such a tool is explained in this paper as well. A toy example of 4-task workflow is also used to illustrate the concept and analysis of ROTWNs.