219 research outputs found
Reduction rules for reset workflow nets
When a workflow contains a large number of tasks and involves complex control flow dependencies, verification can take too much time or it may even be impossible. Reduction rules can be used to abstract from certain transitions and places in a large net and thus could cut down the size of the net used for verification. Petri nets have been proposed to model and analyse workflows and Petri nets reduction rules have been used for efficient verification of various properties of workflows, such as liveness and boundedness. Reset nets are Petri nets with reset arcs, which can remove tokens from places when a transition fires. The nature of reset arcs closely relates to the cancellation behaviour in workflows. As a result, reset nets have been proposed to formally represent workflows with cancellation behaviour, which is not easily modelled in ordinary Petri nets. Even though reduction rules exist for Petri nets, the nature of reset arcs could invalidate the transformation rules applicable to Petri nets. This motivated us to consider possible reduction rules for reset nets. In this paper, we propose a number of reduction rules for Reset Workflow Nets (RWF-nets) that are soundness preserving. These reduction rules are based on reduction rules available for Petri nets [19] and we present the necessary conditions under which these rules hold in the context of reset nets
Reduction rules for YAWL workflow nets with cancellation regions and OR-joins
A reduction rule can transform a large net into a smaller and simple net while preserving certain interesting properties and it is usually applied before verification to reduce the complexity and to prevent state space explosion. Reset nets have been proposed to formally describe workflows with cancellation behaviour. In our previous work, we have presented a set of reduction rules for Reset Workflow Net (RWF-net), which is a subclass of reset nets. In this paper, we will present a set of reduction rules for YAWL nets with cancellation regions and OR-joins. The reduction rules for RWF-nets combined with the formal mappings from YAWL nets provide us with the means to dene a set of reduction rules for YAWL nets. We will also demonstrate how these reduction rules can be used for efficient verification of YAWL nets these features
Soundness of workflow nets : classification, decidability, and analysis
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
On Negotiation as Concurrency Primitive
We introduce negotiations, a model of concurrency close to Petri nets, with
multiparty negotiation as primitive. We study the problems of soundness of
negotiations and of, given a negotiation with possibly many steps, computing a
summary, i.e., an equivalent one-step negotiation. We provide a complete set of
reduction rules for sound, acyclic, weakly deterministic negotiations and show
that, for deterministic negotiations, the rules compute the summary in
polynomial time
Adaptable processes
We propose the concept of adaptable processes as a way of overcoming the
limitations that process calculi have for describing patterns of dynamic
process evolution. Such patterns rely on direct ways of controlling the
behavior and location of running processes, and so they are at the heart of the
adaptation capabilities present in many modern concurrent systems. Adaptable
processes have a location and are sensible to actions of dynamic update at
runtime; this allows to express a wide range of evolvability patterns for
concurrent processes. We introduce a core calculus of adaptable processes and
propose two verification problems for them: bounded and eventual adaptation.
While the former ensures that the number of consecutive erroneous states that
can be traversed during a computation is bound by some given number k, the
latter ensures that if the system enters into a state with errors then a state
without errors will be eventually reached. We study the (un)decidability of
these two problems in several variants of the calculus, which result from
considering dynamic and static topologies of adaptable processes as well as
different evolvability patterns. Rather than a specification language, our
calculus intends to be a basis for investigating the fundamental properties of
evolvable processes and for developing richer languages with evolvability
capabilities
Connectivity of workflow nets : the foundations of stepwise verification
Behavioral models capture operational principles of real-world or designed systems. Formally, each behavioral model defines the state space of a system, i.e., its states and the principles of state transitions. Such a model is the basis for analysis of the system’s properties. In practice, state spaces of systems are immense, which results in huge computational complexity for their analysis. Behavioral models are typically described as executable graphs, whose execution semantics encodes a state space. The structure theory of behavioral models studies the relations between the structure of a model and the properties of its state space. In this article, we use the connectivity property of graphs to achieve an efficient and extensive discovery of the compositional structure of behavioral models; behavioral models get stepwise decomposed into components with clear structural characteristics and inter-component relations. At each decomposition step, the discovered compositional structure of a model is used for reasoning on properties of the whole state space of the system. The approach is exemplified by means of a concrete behavioral model and verification criterion. That is, we analyze workflow nets, a well-established tool for modeling behavior of distributed systems, with respect to the soundness property, a basic correctness property of workflow nets. Stepwise verification allows the detection of violations of the soundness property by inspecting small portions of a model, thereby considerably reducing the amount of work to be done to perform soundness checks. Besides formal results, we also report on findings from applying our approach to an industry model collection
Possibilistic WorkFlow nets for dealing with cancellation regions in business processes
In this paper, an approach based on WorkFlow nets and possibilistic Petri nets is proposed for dealing with the cancellation features in business processes. Routing patterns existing in business processes are modeled by WorkFlow nets. Possibilistic Petri nets with uncertainty in the marking and the transition firing are used to deal with all possible markings when cancellation behaviour is considered. Combining both formalisms, a kind of possibilisticWorkFlow net is obtained. An example of a simplified version of a credit card application process is presented
Vérification efficace de systèmes à compteurs à l'aide de relaxations
Abstract : Counter systems are popular models used to reason about systems in various fields such as the analysis of concurrent or distributed programs and the discovery and verification of business processes. We study well-established problems on various classes of counter systems. This thesis focusses on three particular systems, namely Petri nets, which are a type of model for discrete systems with concurrent and sequential events, workflow nets, which form a subclass of Petri nets that is suited for modelling and reasoning about business processes, and continuous one-counter automata, a novel model that combines continuous semantics with one-counter automata. For Petri nets, we focus on reachability and coverability properties. We utilize directed search algorithms, using relaxations of Petri nets as heuristics, to obtain novel semi-decision algorithms for reachability and coverability, and positively evaluate a prototype implementation. For workflow nets, we focus on the problem of soundness, a well-established correctness notion for such nets. We precisely characterize the previously widely-open complexity of three variants of soundness. Based on our insights, we develop techniques to verify soundness in practice, based on reachability relaxation of Petri nets. Lastly, we introduce the novel model of continuous one-counter automata. This model is a natural variant of one-counter automata, which allows reasoning in a hybrid manner combining continuous and discrete elements. We characterize the exact complexity of the reachability problem in several variants of the model.Les systèmes à compteurs sont des modèles utilisés afin de raisonner sur les systèmes
de divers domaines tels l’analyse de programmes concurrents ou distribués, et
la découverte et la vérification de systèmes d’affaires. Nous étudions des problèmes
bien établis de différentes classes de systèmes à compteurs. Cette thèse se penche sur
trois systèmes particuliers : les rĂ©seaux de Petri, qui sont un type de modèle pour les systèmes discrets Ă
événements concurrents et séquentiels ; les « réseaux de processus », qui forment une sous-classe des réseaux de Petri
adaptée à la modélisation et au raisonnement des processus d’affaires ; les automates continus à un compteur, un nouveau modèle qui combine une
sémantique continue à celles des automates à un compteur.
Pour les réseaux de Petri, nous nous concentrons sur les propriétés d’accessibilité
et de couverture. Nous utilisons des algorithmes de parcours de graphes, avec
des relaxations de réseaux de Petri comme heuristiques, afin d’obtenir de nouveaux
algorithmes de semi-décision pour l’accessibilité et la couverture, et nous évaluons
positivement un prototype.
Pour les «réseaux de processus», nous nous concentrons sur le problème de validité,
une notion de correction bien établie pour ces réseaux. Nous caractérisions
précisément la complexité calculatoire jusqu’ici largement ouverte de trois variantes
du problème de validité. En nous basant sur nos résultats, nous développons des techniques
pour vérifier la validité en pratique, à l’aide de relaxations d’accessibilité dans
les réseaux de Petri. Enfin, nous introduisons le nouveau modèle d’automates continus à un compteur. Ce modèle est une variante naturelle des automates à un compteur, qui permet de
raisonner de manière hybride en combinant des éléments continus et discrets. Nous
caractérisons la complexité exacte du problème d’accessibilité dans plusieurs variantes
du modèle
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