On the Semantics of EPCs: A Framework for Resolving the Vicious Circle

Kindler, Ekkart

doi:10.1007/978-3-540-25970-1_6

Cited by 62 publications

(53 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Chapter 4 in [AH04]). Similar approaches have been applied to other languages such as EPCs [KNS92,Kin06], BPMN [Whi09], etc. Six reduction rules that preserve correctness for EPCs including reduction rules for trivial constructs, simple splits and joins, similar splits and joins, XOR loops and optional OR-loops are proposed in [DAV05].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Soundness of workflow nets: classification, decidability, and analysis

et al. 2011

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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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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Soundness of workflow nets: classification, decidability, and analysis

et al. 2011

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“…We also normalised multiple start and end events, and replaced OR-split and OR-join connectors with AND connectors (which does not impact on the behavioural profile, but on the causal behavioural profile). For 493 EPC models, these pre-processing steps led to a model that could be transformed into a sound free-choice WF-system following on common EPC formalisations (eg., [9]). …”

Section: Implementation and Experimental Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Note that Petri net based formalisations have been presented for (parts of) common process modelling languages, such as BPEL, EPCs, and UML, e.g., [8,9,10]. Based on [7,11], we recall basic definitions.…”

Section: Preliminariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Efficient Computation of Causal Behavioural Profiles Using Structural Decomposition

Weidlich

Polyvyanyy

Mendling

et al. 2010

Applications and Theory of Petri Nets

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Abstract. Identification of behavioural contradictions is an important aspect of software engineering, in particular for checking the consistency between a business process model used as system specification and a corresponding workflow model used as implementation. In this paper, we propose causal behavioural profiles as the basis for a consistency notion, which capture essential behavioural information, such as order, exclusiveness, and causality between pairs of activities. Existing notions of behavioural equivalence, such as bisimulation and trace equivalence, might also be applied as consistency notions. Still, they are exponential in computation. Our novel concept of causal behavioural profiles provides a weaker behavioural consistency notion that can be computed efficiently using structural decomposition techniques for sound free-choice workflow systems if unstructured net fragments are acyclic or can be traced back to S-or T-nets.

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“…Formalizing the OR-join is challenging as highlighted by previous experiences in defining semantics for languages that incorporate this construct, such as EPCs [10] and YAWL [19]. Unlike other routing constructs, the OR-join has a non-local semantics: in order to determine whether or not an OR-join is enabled, it is not sufficient to examine the presence of tokens in its immediate vicinity.…”

Section: Fig 1 Process Fragment With An Or-join (Example Inspired Fmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is suggested that any formal OR-join semantics will impose some restrictions or will deviate from the informal semantics to some extent. This leads to a proposal by Kindler [10,11] to define a non-local semantics in EPCs (including the OR-join) in terms of a pair of transition relations using techniques from fixed point theory. Kindler's semantics can be considered as the most general and precise semantics of the OR-join, but as acknowledged by the author in subsequent papers, such fixed-point techniques are "very inefficient and intractable in practise" [5,6] To address this computational complexity hurdle, Kindler proposed the use of binary decision diagrams (BDDs) to represent large sets of states and large transition relations in a compact manner [11].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Semantics of Standard Process Models with OR-Joins

Dumas

Grosskopf

Hettel

et al.

On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems 2007: CoopIS, DOA, ODBASE, GADA, and IS

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Abstract. The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is an emerging standard for capturing business processes. Like its predecessors, BPMN lacks a formal semantics and many of its features are subject to interpretation. One construct of BPMN that has an ambiguous semantics is the OR-join. Several formal semantics of this construct have been proposed for similar languages such as EPCs and YAWL. However, these existing semantics are computationally expensive. This paper formulates a semantics of the OR-join in BPMN for which enablement of an OR-join in a process model can be evaluated in quadratic time in terms of the total number of elements in the model. This complexity can be reduced down to linear-time after materializing a quadratic-sized data structure at design-time. The paper also shows how to efficiently detect the enablement of an OR-join incrementally as the execution of a process instance unfolds.

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On the Semantics of EPCs: A Framework for Resolving the Vicious Circle

Cited by 62 publications

References 3 publications

Soundness of workflow nets: classification, decidability, and analysis

Soundness of workflow nets: classification, decidability, and analysis

Efficient Computation of Causal Behavioural Profiles Using Structural Decomposition

Semantics of Standard Process Models with OR-Joins

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