Termination analysis of business process workflows

Abstract

For safety and deadlock analysis of workflows, Petri-Nets are frequently used. They provide a natural abstraction of workflows since they are able to describe parallel behavior. With a variety of model checking tools, it is possible to verify these workflows. The usual approach that abstracts business processes to Petri-Nets requires that each loop (whether purely internal or with external interactions) is terminating. In this paper, we show that without this termination assumption, there are real behaviors of business processes that are not represented by the Petri-Net abstractions and we provide a first approach towards termination analysis of loops in business processes thereby ensuring the preconditions required by many Petri-Net based approaches for analyzing business processes.