Searching for Deviations in Trading Systems: Combining Control-Flow and Data Perspectives

Abstract

Trading systems are software platforms that support the exchange of securities (e.g., company shares) between participants. In this paper, we present a method to search for deviations in trading systems by checking conformance between colored Petri nets and event logs. Colored Petri nets (CPNs) are an extension of Petri nets, a formalism for modeling of distributed systems. CPNs allow us to describe an expected causal ordering between system activities and how data attributes of domainrelated objects (e.g., orders to trade) must be transformed. Event logs consist of traces corresponding to runs of a real system. By comparing CPNs and event logs, different types of deviations can be detected. Using this method, we report the validation of a real-life trading system.