Workflow systems aim to provide automated support for the conduct of certain business processes. Workflow systems are driven by workflow specifications which among others, capture the execution interdependencies between various activities. These interdependencies are modelled by means of different control flow constructors, e.g., sequence, choice, parallelism and synchronisation. It has been shown in the research on workflow patterns that the support for and the interpretation of various control flow constructs varies substantially across workflow systems. Two of the most problematic patterns relate to the OR-join and to cancellation. An OR-join is used in situations when we need to model " wait and see" behaviour for synchronisation. Different approaches assign a different (often only intuitive) semantics to this type of join, though they do share the common theme that synchronisation is only to be performed for active paths. Depending on context assumptions this behaviour may be relatively easy to deal with, though in general its semantics is complicated, both from a definition point of view (in terms of formally capturing a desired intuitive semantics) and from a computational point of view (how does one determine whether an OR-join is enabled?). Many systems and languages struggle with the semantics and implementation of the OR-join because its non-local semantics require a synchronisation depending on an analysis of future execution paths. This may require some non-trivial reasoning. The presence of cancellation features and other OR-joins in a workflow further complicates the formal semantics of the OR-join. The cancellation feature is commonly used to model external events that can change the behaviour of a running workflow. It can be used to either disable activities in certain parts of a workflow or to stop currently running activities. Even though it is possible to cancel activities in workflow systems using some sort of abort function, many workflow systems do not provide direct support for this feature in the workflow language. Sometimes, cancellation affects only a selected part of a workflow and other activities can continue after performing a cancellation action. As cancellation occurs naturally in business scenarios, comprehensive support in a workflow language is desirable. We take on the challenge of providing formal semantics, verification techniques as well as an implementation for workflows with those features. This thesis addresses three interrelated issues for workflows with cancellation regions and OR-joins. The concept of the OR-join is examined in detail in the context of the workflow language YAWL, a powerful workflow language designed to support a collection of workflow patterns and inspired by Petri nets. The OR-join semantics has been redesigned to represent a general, formal, and decidable approach for workflows in the presence of cancellation regions and other OR-joins. This approach exploits a link that is proposed between YAWL and reset nets, a variant of Petri nets with a special type of arc that can remove all tokens from a place. Next, we explore verification techniques for workflows with cancellation regions and OR-joins. Four structural properties have been identified and a verification approach that exploits coverability and reachability notions from reset nets has been proposed. The work on verification techniques has highlighted potential problems with calculating state spaces for large workflows. Applying reduction rules before carrying out verification can decrease the size of the problem by cutting down the size of the workflow that needs to be examined while preserving some essential properties. Therefore, we have extended the work on verification by proposing reduction rules for reset nets and for YAWL nets with and without OR-joins. The proposed OR-join semantics as well as the proposed verification approach have been implemented in the YAWL environment.

Ce travail porte sur l’optimisation robuste des lignes de production au stade de la conception. La conception de telles lignes peut être interprétée comme un problème d’optimisation consistant à rechercher une configuration optimisant des objectifs individuels et à respecter les contraintes technologiques et économiques. Nous considérons deux types de lignes de production : l’assemblage et le transfert. Le premier peut être représenté comme un ensemble de stations ordonnées linéairement où les tâches sont exécutées de manière séquentielle. Le second type de ligne est constitué de machines de transfert comprenant plusieurs têtes multibroches. Toutes les tâches d’une même tête sont exécutées simultanément, tandis que les outils d’une machine fonctionnent en mode séquentiel. Nous décrivons différentes approches permettant de modéliser l’incertitude des données dans les problèmes d’équilibrage de ligne. Notre objectif est d’identifier les approches les mieux adaptées au contexte de la conception. En particulier, l’attention se concentre sur l’approche robuste. Nous proposons un nouveau critère d’optimisation basé sur le rayon de stabilité d’une solution réalisable. Ensuite, des formulations robustes sont présentées pour la conception des lignes d’assemblage et de transfert lorsque le temps de traitement des tâches est sujet à des incertitudes. Nous développons également des méthodes heuristiques dont les résultats sont utilisés pour renforcer les modèles mathématiques. Enfin, une nouvelle méthode de résolution hybride est élaborée pour résoudre différentes variantes des problèmes de maximisation du rayon de stabilité. / This work deals with a robust optimisation of production lines at the design stage. The design of such lines can be interpreted as an optimisation problem that consists in finding a configuration optimising individual objectives and respecting technological and economic constraints. We conside rtwo types of production lines: assembly and transfer lines. The first one can be represented as a set of linearly ordered stations where the tasks are executed sequentially. The second one is composed of transfer machines, including several multispindle heads. All tasks within a single head are executed simultaneously, while tools on a machine work in a sequential mode. We describe different approaches for modelling the uncertainty of data in line balancing problems. Our objective is to identify the approaches that best fit the context of the design. In particular, the attention concentrates on the robust approach. We propose a new optimisation criterion based on the stability radius of a feasible solution. Then, robust formulations are presented for the design of the assembly and transfer lines under variations of task processing times. We also develop heuristic methods whose results are used to improve mathematical models. Finally, a new hybrid resolution method is elaborated to solve different variants of the stability radius maximisation.