Working with the Past: Integrating History in Petri Nets

Most information systems that are driven by process models (e.g., workflow management systems) record events in event logs, also known as transaction logs or audit trails. We consider processes that not only keep track of their history in a log, but also make decisions based on this log. To model such processes we extend the basic Petri net framework with the notion of history and add guards to transitions evaluated on the process history. We show that some classes of history-dependent nets can be automatically converted to classical Petri nets for analysis purposes. These classes are characterized by the form of the guards (e.g., LTL+Past guards) and sometimes the additional requirement that the underlying classical Petri net is either bounded or has finite synchronization distances.