Translating Workflow Nets to Process Trees : An Algorithmic Approach

Abstract

Since their introduction, process trees have been frequently used as a process modeling formalism in many process mining algorithms.A process tree is a (mathematical) tree-based model of a process, in which internal vertices represent behavioral control-flow relations and leaves represent process activities.Translation of a process tree into a sound workflow net is trivial.However, the reverse is not the case.Simultaneously, an algorithm that translates a WF-net into a process tree is of great interest, e.g., the explicit knowledge of the control-flow hierarchy in a WF-net allows one to reason on its behavior more easily.Hence, in this paper, we present such an algorithm, i.e., it detects whether a WF-net corresponds to a process tree, and, if so, constructs it.We prove that, if the algorithm finds a process tree, the language of the process tree is equal to the language of the original WF-net.The experiments conducted show that the algorithm's corresponding implementation has a quadratic time complexity in the size of the WF-net.Furthermore, the experiments show strong evidence of process tree rediscoverability.

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