Introducing Concurrency to Workflows: Theory and A Real-World Case Study

Making use of the concepts of the activity diagrams of the Unified Modeling Language, this paper defines an important class of workflows, called flow independent workflows, which are deterministic in the sense that if a flow independent workflow is given the same multi-set of resources as input over and over again, it will produce the same output every time. After which, this paper provides a methodology, and its accompanying algorithms, that introduces concurrency to flow independent workflows by rearranging the action nodes in every flow of control. It then applies the methodology to a real-world case to demonstrate its usefulness. It concludes with future research possibilities that might extend the methodology to general workflows, i.e., not necessarily flow independent workflows. Keywords—Business process re-engineering; Unified Modeling Language; activity diagrams; flow independent workflows;