Query-Based Approach to Workflow Process Dependency Analysis

Dependency analysis is important in all of the stages of workflow processes. An appropriate analysis will help us to identify the potentially affected entities if changes occur. In this technical report we thoroughly analyze the critical entities of workflow processes and their dependency relationships, and propose a multi-dimensional dependency model, that includes routing dependency, data dependency and role dependency. We further build a knowledge base to represent the multi-dimensional dependency model using the logic programming language Prolog. We then develop a set of query rules that can be applied to the well-defined knowledge base at both activity and process levels to retrieve the potentially affected entities. Finally we use a case study of workflow processes in the healthcare domain to show how our dependency analysis methodology works.