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Petri Nets with Parameterised Data

Modelling and Verification

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Business Process Management (BPM 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12168))

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Abstract

During the last decade, various approaches have been put forward to integrate business processes with different types of data. Each of these approaches reflects specific demands in the whole process-data integration spectrum. One particularly important point is the capability of these approaches to flexibly accommodate processes with multiple cases that need to co-evolve. In this work, we introduce and study an extension of coloured Petri nets, called catalog-nets, providing two key features to capture this type of processes. On the one hand, net transitions are equipped with guards that simultaneously inspect the content of tokens and query facts stored in a read-only, persistent database. On the other hand, such transitions can inject data into tokens by extracting relevant values from the database or by generating genuinely fresh ones. We systematically encode catalog-nets into one of the reference frameworks for the (parameterised) verification of data and processes. We show that fresh-value injection is a particularly complex feature to handle, and discuss strategies to tame it. Finally, we discuss how catalog-nets relate to well-known formalisms in this area.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Here, with slight abuse of notation, we define by \( Val (m)\) the set of all values appearing in m.

  2. 2.

    mcmt has only one index sort, but, as shown in [15], there is no loss of generality in doing that.

  3. 3.

    This is a technicality of mcmt, as explained in [15], since mcmt has only one index sort.

  4. 4.

    Backward reachability is not marking reachability. We consider reachability of a configuration satisfying a property that captures the covering of a data-aware marking.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been partially supported by the UNIBZ projects VERBA and DACOMAN.

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Correspondence to Andrey Rivkin .

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Ghilardi, S., Gianola, A., Montali, M., Rivkin, A. (2020). Petri Nets with Parameterised Data. In: Fahland, D., Ghidini, C., Becker, J., Dumas, M. (eds) Business Process Management. BPM 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12168. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58666-9_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58666-9_4

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