In: Proceedings of Applications and Theory of Petri Nets 2004: 25th International Conference, ICATPN 2004, Bologna, Italy, June 21-25, 2004, pages 197-215. Volume 3099 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science / Cortadella, Reisig (Eds.) --- Springer-Verlag, September 2004.
Abstract: We investigate the decidability of the problem of generalised soundness for Workflow nets: "Every marking reachable from an initial marking with k tokens on the initial place terminates properly, i.e. it can reach a marking with k tokens on the final place, for an arbitrary natural number." We start with considering simple correctness criteria for Workflow nets and reduce them to the check of structural properties formulated in terms of traps and siphons, which can be easily checked. We call the nets that possess those properties Batch Workflow nets (BWF-nets). We show that every sound WF-net can be transformed to a BWF-net with the same behaviour. Then we use algebraic methods to prove that generalized soundness is decidable for BWF-nets and give a decision procedure.