Analysis on demand: Instantaneous soundness checking of industrial business process models

Abstract

We report on a case study on control-flow analysis of business process models. We checked 735 industrial business process models from financial services, telecommunications, and other domains. We investigated these models for soundness (absence of deadlock and lack of synchronization) using three different approaches: the business process verification tool Woflan, the Petri net model checker LoLA, and a recently developed technique based on SESE decomposition. We evaluate the various techniques used by these approaches in terms of their ability of accelerating the check. Our results show that industrial business process models can be checked in a few milliseconds, which enables tight integration of modeling with control-flow analysis. We also briefly compare the diagnostic information delivered by the different approaches and report some first insights from industrial applications. © 2011 Elsevier B.V.