Abstract. Workflow nets, a particular class of Petri nets, have become one of the standard ways to model and analyze workflows. Typically, they are used as an abstraction of the workflow that is used to check the so-called soundness property. This property guarantees the absence of livelocks, deadlocks, and other anomalies that can be detected without domain knowledge. Several authors have proposed alternative notions of soundness and have suggested to use more expressive languages, e.g., models with cancellations or priorities. This paper provides an overview of the different notions of soundness and investigates these in the presence of different extensions of workflow nets. We will show that the eight soundness notions described in the literature are decidable for workflow nets. However, most extensions will make all of these notions undecidable. These new results show the theoretical limits of workflow verification. Moreover, we discuss some of the analysis approaches described in the literature.

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The paper introduces a class :0" of process preorders that are related to contrasimulation equivalence. They are characterized by the constraints that they preserve. The preorder :02 (impossible futures) measures the "degree of determinism" and can be considered as the least discriminating preorder that can be used for the verification of communication protocols. If p :02 q and q is deterministic. then p is deterministic too and the two are branching bisimilar. We present a system for (in)equational reasoning with the preorder :02 and indicate possible applications.

Abstract. We study concurrent processes modelled as workflow Petri nets extended with resource constraints. We define a behavioural correctness criterion called soundness: given a sufficient initial number of resources, all cases in the net are guaranteed to terminate successfully, no matter which schedule is used. We give a necessary and sufficient condition for soundness and an algorithm that checks it.