Sufficient and Necessary Condition to Decide Compatibility for a Class of Interorganizational Workflow Nets

Guanjun Liu,Lijing Chen

doi:10.1155/2015/392945

Abstract

Interorganizational Workflow nets (IWF-nets) can well model many concurrent systems such as web service composition, in which multiple processes interact via sending/receiving messages. Compatibility of IWF-nets is a crucial criterion for the correctness of these systems. It guarantees that a system has no deadlock, livelock, or dead tasks. In our previous work we proved that the compatibility problem is PSPACE-complete for safe IWF-nets. This paper defines a subclass of IWF-nets that can model many cases about interactions. Necessary and sufficient condition is presented to decide their compatibility, and it depends on the net structures only. Finally, an algorithm is developed based on the condition.

Highlights

Petri nets are widely used to model concurrent/distributed systems due to both the intuitive descriptions for these systems and the diversified analysis methods
In our previous work we proved that the compatibility problem is PSPACE-complete for safe IWF-nets
This section defines a subclass of IWF-nets named simple interorganizational workflow nets (SIWF-nets for short)

Summary

Introduction

Petri nets are widely used to model concurrent/distributed systems due to both the intuitive descriptions for these systems and the diversified analysis methods. Researchers utilize structures of Petri nets, such as siphons, resource-transition circuits, and structurally circular waits, to decide liveness or deal with deadlock for these systems [11,12,13,14] Another important application of Petri nets is to model and analyze such concurrent systems as web services, in which multiple parallel processes interact/collaborate via sending/receiving messages. Van der Aalst et al defined some service interaction patterns that should be observed when a complex service is composed of some simpler services [16] They proposed some antipatterns that should be avoided because these patterns possibly introduce some errors like deadlock [16]. The method proposed in this paper opens up a new way to explore the net-structure-based conditions of deciding the compatibility for more complex subclasses of IWF-nets.

Basic Notions

WF-Nets

SIWF-Nets

Sufficient and Necessary Condition for Compatibility of SIWF-Nets

Algorithm to Solve the Compatibility Problem for SIWF-Nets

Conclusion