Model-based Failure Analysis of Business Process

The success of most organisations are based on how well the organisation can engineer and execute their business processes in order to better manage the extra value that these processes can provide. However, business processes may fail to deliver the functions which are designed. In order to help the understanding of how and why a business process may fail, we considered the techniques in system safety engineering and integrated them with existing techniques of business process modelling and analysis. We proposed a framework of business process failure analysis. The kernel of the framework is that we extended the workflow net of a business process by modelling failures as coloured tokens and so that the failure behaviours of the business process can be simulated. In addition, we developed a tool based on the codes of an open source project to support the analysis. The applications of proposed technique have demonstrated that it is a powerful and easy-to-use technique for the management of business processes in large complex enterprise systems.