Business Process Management (Part-2 Business Process Modelling[Chapter IV Process Orchestrations ] ) Sec V -- By Mathias Weske

Nested Processes

The approach of defining the execution semantics of process instances by
state transition diagrams can be extended conveniently to nested processes.
Figure 4.64 shows the extended state transition diagrams for composite tasks.
When an instance of a composite task is started, one token is put on the
exec state, indicating that the task instance is now running. The detailed
status of the subprocess is shown in the lower part of Figure 4.64. Starting
the task also puts a token in the initial condition of the subprocess, marked
by imap.
The ellipsis summarizes the state transition diagram of the subprocess
(without the initial and the final condition, of course). When the subprocess
terminates, the condition omap is reached, and the complete transition can
fire, completing an instance of the subprocess.
The extension of the state transition diagram to composite tasks is orthogonal
to multiple instances tasks, so that by adding an add transition,
multiple instances of composite tasks, and therefore also multiple instances of
subprocesses, can be represented properly.
The example discussed above is used to investigate the execution of composite
task F realized by the extended workflow net W2, shown in Figure 4.62.
A partial state transition diagram focusing on the state of the composite task
is shown in Figure 4.65.
When an instance of the composite task F is executed, a token is put on
the exec state of the state transition diagram of that task. In addition, the
subprocess needs to be started, represented by a token in the start condition
of the extended workflow net that F maps to; since map(F) = W2, a token is
put on i2, the start condition of W2.
The token at i2 enables the subprocess. The first task to execute is H.
The lower part of Figure 4.65 shows the state during the execution of the
subprocess where task H is currently executing. When H terminates, a token
is put on state cHI , so that the execution of the subprocess can continue with the multiple instances task I. This example shows quite well the recursive
application of state transition diagrams for composite tasks.

Advanced Control Flow Patterns

Having discussed how the execution semantics is specified, we can investigate
advanced control flow patterns.

Discriminator
The discriminator is a specific type of join node that uses the first signal it
receives for triggering the outgoing task. The other signals are ignored. When
signals have been received from all incoming branches, the discriminator resets
itself. The authors of Yet AnotherWorkflow Language propose to simulate this
behaviour of the discriminator pattern by an exclusive or join in combination
with a cancellation region in the way shown in Figure 4.66.
In this example, assume that tasks B, C, and D are active concurrently,
following the and split task A. Assuming that B completes first, the discriminator
fires, and E is triggered. Since E is an exclusive or join task, it can
be executed. Since a cancellation region is defined for E, E deletes all tokens
from the region. In this case, tokens are withdrawn from tasks C and D.
This simulation of the discriminator pattern with exclusive or join and
cancellation region is now evaluated with respect to the semantics of the
discriminator. The simulation exhibits significant semantic differences with
the specification of the discriminator. First of all, the discriminator does not
cancel running activities.
All activities on the incoming branches of the discriminator can complete
without disturbances; only their termination will be ignored. Secondly, the
cancellation of the activities takes place on the termination of the task instance
E. So the activities are cancelled not before E starts, but after E terminates.
As a result, the proposed representation of the discriminator pattern in YAWL
is not completely satisfying.