Verifying Modal Workflow Specifications Using Constraint Solving

Abstract

International audienceNowadaysworkflowsareextensivelyusedbycompaniestoimproveorganizationalefficiencyandproductivity.Thispaperfocusesontheverificationofmodalworkflowspecificationsusingconstraintsolvingasacomputationaltool.ItsmaincontributionconsistsindevelopinganinnovativeformalframeworkbasedonconstraintsystemstomodelexecutionsofworkflowPetrinetsandtheirstructuralproperties,aswellastoverifytheirmodalspecifications.Finally,animplementationandpromisingexperimentalresultsconstituteapracticalcontribution

Assessing SMT and CLP approaches for workflow nets verification

“…Among existing workflow specifications, this paper focuses on modal specifications that allow the description of necessary and admissible behaviours over workflow nets, a suited class of Petri nets. Working on case studies of real-life instances of industrial workflows obtained through collaborations with industrial actors, described in part in [3,4], has emphasized the importance of expressing and verifying-at the specification or design stage of the development of large-size workflow netssome required behavioural properties, derived from textual requirements and business analyst expertise. Further, these collaborations have demonstrated the limited scalability of traditional model checking tools based on state space exploration when verifying properties such as the behavioural properties expressed by modal specifications, thereby, assessing the need for efficient and scalable alternative verification methods.…”

“…Further, these collaborations have demonstrated the limited scalability of traditional model checking tools based on state space exploration when verifying properties such as the behavioural properties expressed by modal specifications, thereby, assessing the need for efficient and scalable alternative verification methods. To this end, a recent work in [3] and [4] has introduced and developed a novel formal framework based on constraint systems to model executions of workflow nets and their structural properties, as well as to verify requirements specified by modal specifications.…”

“…This paper precisely investigates these issues. Therefore, the main contributions of this paper are the following: (1) an empirical assessment of the scalability of the verification approach proposed in [3] and [4], (2) an accurate study to evaluate the efficiency of this approach by experimenting two resolution methods -SMT and CLP over Finite Domains-to solve the constraint system that represents the modal specifications to be verified.…”

“…Notice that the contributions of the present article are based on formal means first introduced in [3] and further developed in [4]. As extension to [6,7], this paper provides a full description of the used tools, together with a finer and larger experimental basis.…”

“…Section 2 briefly recaps common concepts and standard notations concerning workflow nets, while Sect. 3 introduces the key aspects of the formal method given in [3] for verifying modal specifications over workflow nets. Afterwards, Sect.…”