An Approach to Master-Slave Workflow System and Its Petri-Net Modeling

In complex workflow systems, some instances processed are compound. A compound instance is treated as a whole object at some phases or as several separated objects at other phases. They are referred as master-slave instances in this paper. This paper proposes an approach to this kind of systems based on colored Petri net. Hierarchy colored tokens are used for decomposing and synchronizing the instances. This approach increases the efficiency and flexibility of processing master-slave instances in a workflow system. The method from the approach is also useful for modeling and analysis of parallel processing in a workflow system.