Soundness unknotted: An efficient soundness checking algorithm for arbitrary cyclic process models by loosening loops

Abstract

Although domain experts usually create business process models, these models can still contain errors. For this reason, research and practice establish criteria for process models to provide confidence in the correctness or correct behavior of processes. One widespread criterion is soundness, which guarantees the absence of deadlocks and lacks of synchronization. Checking soundness of process models is not trivial. However, cyclic process models additionally increase the complexity to check soundness. This paper presents a novel approach for verifying soundness that has an efficient cubic worst-case runtime behavior, even for arbitrary cyclic process models. This approach relies on three key techniques — loop conversion, loop reduction, and loop decomposition — to convert any cyclic process model into a set of acyclic process models. Using this approach, we have developed five straightforward rules to verify the soundness, reusing existing approaches for checking soundness of acyclic models.