Can I find a partner? Undecidability of partner existence for open nets

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t Keywords: Petri net Open net Operability Web service Theory of computation We study open nets as Petri net models of web services, with a link to the practically relevant language WS-BPEL. For those nets, we investigate the problem of operability which we consider as fundamental as the successful notion of soundness for workflow nets, i.e., Petri net models of business processes and workflows. While we could give algorithmic solutions to the operability problem for subclasses of open nets in earlier work, this article shows that the problem is in general undecidable.