Soundness of Resource-Constrained Workflow Nets

Hee, Kees van; Serebrenik, Alexander; Sidorova, Natalia; Voorhoeve, Marc

doi:10.1007/11494744_15

Cited by 37 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…Resources, interaction, and data can be added by introducing resource places (cf. resource-constrained WF-nets [BP98,HSSV05] [Jen97] or other models allowing for the modeling of more involved resource allocation strategies and dataflow. As a result, analysis (other than simulation) tends to get intractable.…”

Section: Is a Workflow Net (Wf-net) If And Only Ifmentioning

confidence: 99%

Soundness of workflow nets: classification, decidability, and analysis

et al. 2011

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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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Section: Is a Workflow Net (Wf-net) If And Only Ifmentioning

confidence: 99%

Soundness of workflow nets: classification, decidability, and analysis

et al. 2011

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“…Well-formed business processes correspond to sound workflow nets (van der Aalst, 2007). Petri nets have been extensively studied since the mid 1990s as an abstraction of the workflow to check the soundness property (van der Aalst, 1998;Barkaoui and Ayed, 2011;Barkaoui and Petrucci, 1998;Basu and Blanning, 2000;Bi and Zhao, 2004;Clempner and Retchkiman, 2005;Clempner, 2014;Dehnert and Rittgen, 2001;van Dongen and Verbeek, 2005;Fu and Su, 2002;2004;van Hee and Voorhoeve, 2005;2004;Karamanolis and Wheater, 2000;Kindler and Reisig, 2000;Lin and Chen, 2002;Lohmann and Weinberg, 2006;Martens, 2005a;2005b;Mendling and van der Aalst, 2007;Sadiq and Orłowska, 1997;Salimifard and Wright, 2001;Vanhatalo and Leymann, 2007;ter Hofstede, 2001, Verbeek andWombacher, 2006;Wynn and ter Hofstede, 2005;Wynn and Edmond, 2006). In their research the authors have proposed alternative notions of soundness and more sophisticated languages, making these notions undecidable.…”

Section: Brief Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

An analytical method for well-formed workflow/Petri net verification of classical soundness

Clempner

2014

International Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science

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In this paper we consider workflow nets as dynamical systems governed by ordinary difference equations described by a particular class of Petri nets. Workflow nets are a formal model of business processes. Well-formed business processes correspond to sound workflow nets. Even if it seems necessary to require the soundness of workflow nets, there exist business processes with conditional behavior that will not necessarily satisfy the soundness property. In this sense, we propose an analytical method for showing that a workflow net satisfies the classical soundness property using a Petri net. To present our statement, we use Lyapunov stability theory to tackle the classical soundness verification problem for a class of dynamical systems described by Petri nets. This class of Petri nets allows a dynamical model representation that can be expressed in terms of difference equations. As a result, by applying Lyapunov theory, the classical soundness property for workflow nets is solved proving that the Petri net representation is stable. We show that a finite and non-blocking workflow net satisfies the sound property if and only if its corresponding PN is stable, i.e., given the incidence matrix A of the corresponding PN, there exists a Φ strictly positive m vector such that AΦ ≤ 0. The key contribution of the paper is the analytical method itself that satisfies part of the definition of the classical soundness requirements. The method is designed for practical applications, guarantees that anomalies can be detected without domain knowledge, and can be easily implemented into existing commercial systems that do not support the verification of workflows. The validity of the proposed method is successfully demonstrated by application examples.

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“…In [10], [12] a more general class of Resource-Constrained Workflow Nets (RCWF-nets) was defined. Informally, the authors impose two constraints on resources.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In [10] it was proven that for RCWF-nets with a single resource type generalized soundness can be effectively checked in polynomial time. In [12] it was proven that generalized soundness is decidable in RCWF-nets with an arbitrary number of resource places (by reducing to the home-space problem).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Deadlock Control in Parallel Resource-Constrained Workflows

Bashkin¹,

Panfilova²

2014

Proceedings of the Spring/Summer Young Researchers' Colloquium on Software Engineering

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Abstract-We study the verification of the soundness property for workflow nets extended with resources. A workflow is sound if it terminates properly (no deadlocks and livelocks are possible). A class of resource-constrained workflow nets (RCWF-nets) is considered, where resources can be used by a process instance, but cannot be created or spent.Two sound RCWF-net, using the same set of resources, can be put in parallel. This parallel composition in some cases may produce additional deadlocks. A problem of deadlock avoidance in parallel workflows is studied, some methods of deadlock search and control are presented.

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Soundness of Resource-Constrained Workflow Nets

Cited by 37 publications

References 10 publications

Soundness of workflow nets: classification, decidability, and analysis

Soundness of workflow nets: classification, decidability, and analysis

An analytical method for well-formed workflow/Petri net verification of classical soundness

On the Deadlock Control in Parallel Resource-Constrained Workflows

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