Formalized Description of Workflow Exception Handlings Based on Automaton

The exception handling is one of the key problems in the work flow management system, where establishing the formalized description of the work flow exception is the foundation for researching and analyzing it. The Petri-net, the predicate expression, etc., describe the work flows in a comparatively strict way, but the descriptions usually are excessively complex and have little intelligence due to the diversity of the modality of the exception handlings. In this paper, we apply the automaton theory to build up a work flow model, which is a uniform model for the exception handling of the work flow. In this model, the intelligence agencies such as Adj can be designed by applying the theories of AI to monitor the actual running status of the work flow, to gather the information of the work flow exceptions, to analyze and locate the exceptions, and to verify and execute the exception handling policy. This approach conveniently solves the uniform modeling problem of the work flow and its exception handlings, and provides a general theory framework for the work flow exception handling.