A Workflow Event Logging Mechanism and its Implications on Quality of Workflows

As the workflow/BPM systems and their applications are prevailing in the wide and variety industries, we can easily predict not only that very large-scale workflow systems (VLSW) become more prevalent and much more needed in the markets, but also that the quality of workflow (QOW) and its related topics be issued in the near future. Particularly, in the QOW issues such as workflow knowledges/intelligence, workflow validations, workflow verifications, workflow mining and workflow rediscovery problems, the toughest challenging and the most impeccable issue is the workflow knowledge mining and discovery problems that are based upon workflow enactment event history information logged by workflow engines equipped with a certain logging mechanism. Therefore, having an efficient event logging mechanism is the most valuable as well as A and Ω of those QOW issues and solutions. In this paper, we propose a workflow enactment event logging mechanism supporting three types of event log information − workcase event type, activity event type and workitem event type, and describe the implementation details of the mechanism so as to be embedded into the e-Chautauqua system that has been recently developed by the CTRL research group as a very large scale workflow management system. Finally, we summarize the implications of the mechanism and its log information on workflow knowledge mining and discovery techniques.