Petri net-based process monitoring: a workflow management system for process modelling and monitoring

Nowadays business process management is becoming a fundamental piece in many industrial processes. To manage the evolution and the interactions of the business actions it is important to accurately model the steps to follow and the resources needed by a process. Workflows provide a way of describing the order of execution and the dependencies between the constituting activities of business processes. Workflow monitoring can help to improve and to avoid delays on industrial environments where concurrent processes are carried out. In this article a new Petri net extension for modeling together workflow activities with their required resources is presented: resource-aware Petri nets. Moreover an intelligent workflow management system for process monitoring and delay prediction is introduced. Resource aware Petri nets include time and resources into the classical Petri net workflow representation, facilitating the task of modeling and monitoring workflows. The workflow management system monitors the execution of workflows and detects possible delays through resource-aware Petri nets. In order to test this new approach, different services from a medical maintenance environment have been modeled and simulated.