YAWL2DVE: An Automated Translator For Workflow Verification

Workflow management systems (WfMSs) have gained increasing attention recently as an important technology to improve information system development in dynamic and distributed organizations. However the absence of verification facilities in most WfMSs causes the resulting implementation of large and complex workflow models to be at risk of undesirable runtime executions. This problem of design validation ensuring the correctness of the design at the earliest stage possible is a major challenge for any responsible system development process, and the activities intended for its solution occupy an ever increasing portion of the development cycle cost and time budgets. Model checking is a popular technique to systematically and automatically verify system properties, but it requires a substantial effort to convert the system design into a specific model checking program. In this paper, we present an automated translator (YAWL2DVE) which can convert a graphical workflow model into DVE, the input language of DiVinE. DiVinE is a distributed and parallel model checker, which can effectively handle the well known “state explosion problem” of this domain. We show the effectiveness of this translator with a case study on a real world health care workflow model.