Mending the lag between commerce and research: A logic-based workflow verification approach

The increasing complexity of business processes in recent years has heightened the need for workflow verification tools. However, there is a significant lag between current commercial needs and research prototypes. Our investigation indicates that existing workflow verification tools depend largely on the Petri net formalism, which is more complex than the modeling formalisms in commercial workflow systems. This makes it difficult to apply those workflow verification tools to commercial workflow systems. This lag between commerce and research motivated our study in developing an alternative approach to workflow verification. In this paper, we propose a logic-based verification method that is easier to implement in commercial workflow systems than Petri-net-based verification methods. We further demonstrate that our logic-based workflow verification approach is simple, yet powerful enough to handle complex, including cyclic, workflow models. © 2003 Springer Science+Business Media New York.