Modeling and Performance Evaluation of Work ow Systems

There is a need for modeling and performance evaluation techniques and tools for a fast and reliable design of workkow systems. This paper introduces a modeling methodology based on colored stochastic Petri nets. It allows the integration of functional, organizational, and timing aspects in one modeling framework. The processing delays include stochastic distributions in addition to deterministic times. Several workkows and the eeects of constrained shared resources needed for diierent tasks can easily be described and analyzed together. Functional and organizational aspects are modeled separately in resource and workkow models. These models are automatically compiled into one model, which can then be used for qualitative analysis or performance evaluation. The proposed modeling and evaluation method is supported by the software tool TimeNET. An application example shows the use of the method.