THE APPLICATION OF PETRI NETS TO WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT

TLDR

Workflow management offers a new solution to controlling, monitoring, optimizing, and supporting business processes by explicitly representing process logic, and Petri nets—an established modeling tool—serve both as a design language for complex workflows and a powerful analytical framework for verifying workflow correctness. The paper explores applying Petri nets to workflow management, presenting state‑of‑the‑art verification results and highlighting related workflow tools. It introduces workflow management as a Petri‑net application domain, reviews state‑of‑the‑art workflow verification results, and showcases Petri‑net‑based workflow tools.

Abstract

Workflow management promises a new solution to an age-old problem: controlling, monitoring, optimizing and supporting business processes. What is new about workflow management is the explicit representation of the business process logic which allows for computerized support. This paper discusses the use of Petri nets in the context of workflow management. Petri nets are an established tool for modeling and analyzing processes. On the one hand, Petri nets can be used as a design language for the specification of complex workflows. On the other hand, Petri net theory provides for powerful analysis techniques which can be used to verify the correctness of workflow procedures. This paper introduces workflow management as an application domain for Petri nets, presents state-of-the-art results with respect to the verification of workflows, and highlights some Petri-net-based workflow tools.