Formalization and verification of event-driven process chains

For many companies, business processes have become the focal point of attention. As a result, many tools have been developed for business process engineering and the actual deployment of business processes. Typical examples of these tools are BPR (Business Process Reengineering) tools, ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems, and WFM (Worliflow Management) systems. Some of the leading products, e.g. SAP Rl3 (ERPIWFM) and ARlS (BPR), use Event-driven Process Chains (EPCs) to model business processes. Although event-driven process chains have become a widespread process modeling technique, they suffer from a serious drawback: neither the syntax nor the semantics of an event-driven process chain are well defined. In this paper, this problem is tackled by mapping event-driven process chains onto Petri nets. Petri nets have formal semantics and provide an abundance of analysis techniques. As a result, the approach presented in this paper gives formal semantics to event-driven process chains. Moreover, manyanalysis techniques become available for event-driven process chains. To illustrate the approach, it is shown that the correctness of an event-driven process chain can be checked in polynomial time by using Petri-net-based analysis techniques.