A class of Petri nets for modeling and analyzing business processes

Abstract

More and more firms are marching to the drumbeat of Business Process Reengineering (BPR) and Workflow Management (WFM). This trend exposes the need for techniques for the construction and analysis of business procedures. In this paper we focus on a class of Petri nets suitable for the representation, validation and verification of these procedures. We will show that the correctness of a procedure represented by such a Petri net can be verified in polynomial time. Based on this result we provide a comprehensive set of transformation rules which can be used to construct and modify correct procedures.