Correctness Notions for Petri Nets with Identifiers

TL;DR

This paper extends Petri nets to model information systems with object instances and resources, proposing new correctness criteria that generalize classical workflow soundness.

Contribution

It introduces a Petri nets extension for object- and resource-aware systems and proposes new correctness notions generalizing workflow soundness.

Findings

Proposes correctness criteria for object- and resource-aware Petri nets.

Discusses decidability of these criteria for certain system classes.

Generalizes classical soundness to systems with object instances.

Abstract

A model of an information system describes its processes and how resources are involved in these processes to manipulate data objects. This paper presents an extension to the Petri nets formalism suitable for describing information systems in which states refer to object instances of predefined types and resources are identified as instances of special object types. Several correctness criteria for resource- and object-aware information systems models are proposed, supplemented with discussions on their decidability for interesting classes of systems. These new correctness criteria can be seen as generalizations of the classical soundness property of workflow models concerned with process control flow correctness.