Compiling More Precise Petri Net Models for an Improved Verification of Service Implementations

Abstract

Verification of distributed business processes typically relies on Petri-net-based process models, which allow for a natural modeling and analysis of aspects like parallelism and message exchange. Unfortunately, such a process model is seldom complete and precise today, mainly because the available techniques for its derivation neglect process data in favor of a feasible verification. In this paper, we present an approach for deriving more precise process models in terms of a transforming process-to-Petri-net compiler, which takes as input a business process and generates as output a Petri net model for the process which can subsequently be used for verification. However, in contrast to a conventional compiler, its objective is not to result in efficient runtime code but rather to produce a most-precise though still effectively verifiable Petri-net-based process model.