Abstract. 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.

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The research domain of process discovery aims at constructing a process model (e.g. a Petri net) which is an abstract representation of an execution log. Such a model should (1) be able to reproduce the log under consideration and (2) be independent of the number of cases in the log. In this paper, we present a process discovery algorithm where we use concepts taken from the language-based theory of regions, a well-known Petri net research area. We identify a number of shortcomings of this theory from the process discovery perspective, and we provide solutions based on integer linear programming.

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