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

Nowadays business process management is becoming a fundamental piece of many industrial processes. To manage the evolution and interactions between 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 avoid delays in industrial environments where concurrent processes are carried out. In this article a new Petri net extension for modelling workflow activities together with their required resources is presented: resource-aware Petri nets (RAPN). An intelligent workflow management system for process monitoring and delay prediction is also introduced. Resource aware-Petri nets include time and resources within the classical Petri net workflow representation, facilitating the task of modelling and monitoring workflows. The workflow management system monitors the execution of workflows and detects possible delays using RAPN. In order to test this new approach, different services from a medical maintenance environment have been modelled and simulateThis research project has been partially funded through the projects labeled TIN2008-04547 and DPI2011-24929, the BR10/18 grant of the University of Girona conceded to Albert Pla and the FPU-AP2009-2831 grant conceded to Pablo Gay. The authors also thank the representatives of the contributing enterprises of the EU-Project "AIMES" (ITEA2-07017), for the constructive subject-specific collaboration. AIMES project was supported by the Spanish Avanza I+D program (support code TSI-020400- 2008-47) within the EU-programme ITEA