Consider the following business process at an insurance company. The process includes two major roles, agents (supporting customers outdoor) and clerks (work indoors). When the insurance company receives a new claim, the clerk calls the agent to actually check the claim, and creates a new case. As both tasks are executed by different roles (that are mapped to different people), the activities are scheduled in parallel. After the agent has confirmed the claim to the clerk, he supports the customer with additional assistance (e.g. getting a new id-card from the public authority). After the clerk has received the confirmation from the agent, she issues a money order for the claim. If the agent has completed his additional support and the clerk has issued the money order, the claim is closed.
a) Derive from the text the activities, the execution constraints (sequence, parallel), as well as the mapping of roles to activities.
b) Create a workflow net capturing the behavioral part of the insurance claim process. Assume that informing the clerk about successful checking of the claim by the agent are two simple activities (e.g. Inform Clerk, Receive Confirmation).
c) Extend the process model to support an explicit synchronization of the confirmation between the agent and the clerk. Discuss the problems that arise.
d) Discuss the problem that might arise if the agent rejects the confirmation (the claim is a fraud). In this case the claim should be canceled immediately.
Hint: For an extended discussion of the problems check out the two additional workflow patterns Milestone and Cancel Case (http://www.workflowpatterns.com/).