WFNet

Overview

The WFNet plugin adds a new special kind of transition to renew -a workflow task- and a new workflow formalism to handle the new transition. The functionality of this plugin was developed by Thomas Jacob (see Jacob) as part of the Workflow plugin and later extracted in a teaching project as a own plugin to separate the formalism from the workflow engine that is provided by the Workflow plugin. This plugin on its own doesn't offer a way to fire the workflow tast transition. For this a workflow engine is needed.

Usage

The new formalism added by this plugin is located in the simulation menu under formalisms and titled there as "Workflow Compiler". After activating the new formalism the new transition is added to the toolbar and can be used like the normal transitions. It needs a special inscription though with the following syntax: \[taskName,parameter(,result, (priority))\].

Further details on the parameters are found here: Workflow plugin.

Semantically a task transition can be described with 3 normal transition and a place and is used that way on the shadow net layer. The following picture shows the converting(taken from Wagner):

Related Works

A user guide and the api documentation for this plugin and the workflow plugin are in the appendix of Jacob.

Examples

Examples are included in the Workflow plugin.

References

Jacob, Thomas (2002). “Implementierung einer sicheren und rollenbasierten Workflowmanagement-Komponente für ein Petrinetzwerkzeug”. Diploma Thesis. Vogt-Kölln Str. 30, D-22527 Hamburg: Universität Hamburg, Fachbereich Informatik

Wagner, Thomas (2018). “Petri Net-based Combination and Integration of Agents and Workflows”. Diss. Vogt-Kölln Str. 30, D-22527 Hamburg: Universität Hamburg, Fachbereich Informatik. url: ​http://ediss.sub.uni-hamburg.de/volltexte/2018/8995/