• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.1702-1721
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• 2019

A workflow process (or business process) management system helps to define, execute, monitor and manage workflow models deployed on a workflow-supported enterprise, and the system is compartmentalized into a modeling subsystem and an enacting subsystem, in general. The modeling subsystem's functionality is to discover and analyze workflow models via a theoretical modeling methodology like ICN, to graphically define them via a graphical representation notation like BPMN, and to systematically deploy those graphically defined models onto the enacting subsystem by transforming into their textual models represented by a standardized workflow process definition language like XPDL. Before deploying those defined workflow models, it is very important to inspect its syntactical correctness as well as its structural properness to minimize the loss of effectiveness and the depreciation of efficiency in managing the corresponding workflow models. In this paper, we are particularly interested in verifying very large-scale and massively parallel workflow models, and so we need a sophisticated analyzer to automatically analyze those specialized and complex styles of workflow models. One of the sophisticated analyzers devised in this paper is able to analyze not only the structural complexity but also the data-sequence complexity, especially. The structural complexity is based upon combinational usages of those control-structure constructs such as subprocesses, exclusive-OR, parallel-AND and iterative-LOOP primitives with preserving matched pairing and proper nesting properties, whereas the data-sequence complexity is based upon combinational usages of those relevant data repositories such as data definition sequences and data use sequences. Through the devised and implemented analyzer in this paper, we are able eventually to achieve the systematic verifications of the syntactical correctness as well as the effective validation of the structural properness on those complicate and large-scale styles of workflow models. As an experimental study, we apply the implemented analyzer to an exemplary large-scale and massively parallel workflow process model, the Large Bank Transaction Workflow Process Model, and show the structural complexity analysis results via a series of operational screens captured from the implemented analyzer.