Initial Achievements

From now on, we’ll start creating a post to show the weekly advances of the project. Since we are already working for some weeks now, next we will show all that have been achieved in that time and the problems that we found during it.

Starting from the beginning…

Since we are working with EPC’s, first of all, we had to study it and understand its syntax and semantics. We also downloaded ProM and got familiarized with the platform.

After that, we needed a tool that would enable us to design EPC’s and above all, save the files in EPML (Event-Driven Process Chain Markup Language) format because it is the only EPC format that ProM can interpret.

After a search on google, we found a plug-in for Eclipse SDK that would do exactly what we needed. This plug-in is called EPC Tools.

Having this tool, we used some of the DTIM business processes to modulate them in EPC’s.

At this point we faced a problem. ProM couldn’t load the files. After many hours trying to find out why, we got to the conclusion that those files had many misplaced tags. The EPML files generated from EPC Tools didn’t respect the EPML Schema.

In order to resolve this issue, we downloaded a XML Analyser plug-in for Eclipse SDK that allowed us to trace and correct the errors inside the EPML files.

With this problem solved, we could now load all our files on ProM and use some of the EPC plug-ins provided by the platform.

We studied the platform documentation to learn how to create and deploy an analysis plugin. After knowing this, we also studied some example plug-in’s source code to understand how an EPC was stored in memory and how we could gain access to it.

At this point we were able to start coding our plug-in. In the implementation we found some normal problems that could easily be solved.

The formula used in our code to calculate the complexity was taken from a paper written by our advisor.

We also implemented a functionality to calculate the density of an EPC but we didn’t implement a specific formula for now.

In order to test our plug-in, we created an EPC that contains all the three kinds of logical connectors, and the result obtained was correct.