| Abstract: | Business processes and its related workflow systems have received greater interest in practice and research in the last decade. Many analytical methodologies for analysis and design of workflow systems emerged. A recent formal approach to study workflows using a graph-theoretic method called ‘metagraphs’ has demonstrated effectiveness for analysing connectivity and interactions of information and resources between workflow components. However, past works in analysis of metagraph are element-based. Since nodes in metagraphs represent either the input or output of an activity it is natural to process information contained in a node taken as a unit. This paper takes a node-centric view on metagraphs that is a major departure from the element-based approach today. The change in focus requires provisioning an analysis framework under the node-centric views. New basic constructs including, but not limited to, concepts such as: ‘surplus sets’, ‘deficit sets’, ‘state of a path’, and ‘node-centric view of adjacency matrices’ are introduced. The approach produces computational feasible systems for elements that are over supplied and/or under supplied from a source node to a target node of any path of the metagraph. Such information could be valuable for designing workflow systems. Also, the node-centric approach is shown to be an extension of the basic constructs of element-view metagraphs and is a complementary method for validating information requirements of workflow modelling. Illustrative examples are given. |
