Supervisory Control for Business Process Management Systems

The behavior of a business process often needs to be constrained according to a given control specification, that comes to cope with new business requirements. Such a control, called supervisory control, is applied to an existing business process specification without having to re-design the running procedures. Hence, there is no need to create a new complete business process model every time the control parameters change. The objective of supervisory control is to limit the behavior of the initial business process to only desired situations. In this paper, a controller synthesis method for business processes is proposed by adapting the supervisory control theory initiated by Ramadge and Wonham. Business process models are specified by using a variant of Workflow nets, which introduces colors in order to represent different process instances and the related data. An algorithm allowing automatic generation of a controller described by a colored Petri net is provided in this paper.