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This paper focuses on the behavior similarity of workflow nets (WF-nets). The similarity of two WF-nets reflects their consistent degree in behaviors. It explores the behavioral relations of subsets of transitions based on the interleaving semantics, and more accurate relations are defined than the existing work. Therefore, a more accurate similarity of two WF-nets (in their behaviors) can be obtained than that in the existing work that usually do not consider the loop and complex correspondence. By refining the interleaving relation in a behavioral profile into six types, this paper proposes the notion of a relation profile based on behavioral profile. Based on the relation profile of a WF-net, behavioral relation matrix can be constructed. Additionally, we refine the complex correspondence and generate a group of behavioral relation submatrices from the behavioral relation matrix. By using them we present a new formula to measure the behavior similarity of two WF-nets. Finally, examples illustrate that our method can measure the similarity degree more accurately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The e-commerce business process net (EBPN) is a novel formal model for describing an e-commerce system and its interactive parts, such as shoppers, merchants, and the third-party payment platforms. Vulnerability analysis has a great impact on the trustworthiness of EBPN, which is an issue stemming from data inconsistency problems. Data inconsistency problems affect the consistency of the EBPN transaction analysis. The underlying causes of inconsistent data are closely related to concurrent operations, such as control flow and data flow. However, most of the existing detection methods have difficulties characterizing the vulnerabilities and interactions of control and data flows. In this paper, we propose a new method based on the dynamic data slice (DDS) that considers both transaction consistency and data state consistency. First, by analyzing control flow characteristics of EBPN, we obtain the dynamic slice. This dynamic slice is based on all paths of the EBPN reachability graph. Second, we perform the data inconsistency analysis by considering both transaction consistency and data-state consistency. Based on these, we construct a DDS to characterize the behavioral logic and the data-dependence information. The DDS acquires the dynamic data firing sequence. Based on that sequence and a given data marking, we can construct the DDSs for several types of EBPNs. Constructing the DDS can be completed in polynomial time. The DDS is designed to characterize the behavioral logic and data-dependence information. Based on these, we design a method to judge the data constraints. This method satisfies the EBPN need for transaction consistency by considering both the control and data states. In addition, according to the data-dependence information, we can lock the vulnerable regions caused by abnormal trading data in the system. Finally, we give a method to compute the vulnerability level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

E-commerce business process nets (EBPNs) are a novel formal model for describing and validating e-commerce systems including interactive parties such as shopper, merchant, and third-party payment platform. Data errors and nondeterminacy of the data states during the trading process can be depicted with the help of EBPNs. However, the problem about how to analyze EBPNs remains largely open. To analyze their data-liveness, data-boundedness, and reachability, this paper presents two analysis methods. For EBPNs, reachability analysis is proposed based on a 3-D incidence matrix method. Additionally, reduction methods are proposed for a special EBPN. Finally, the validity and reliability of the proposed methods are illustrated via the examples of e-commerce systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recently, cross-department business processes are becoming more and more complex. Different kinds of coordination patterns exist among different departments, which make modeling and analysis work more difficult. To our best knowledge, there is no formal method to give systematic modeling and verification for the cross-department processes when considering different kinds of coordination patterns among different departments. This paper proposes such a method based on Petri nets. The WF-net model extended with resource and message factors, RM_WF_Net for short, is first introduced. Then, the formal model of tasks is proposed and its coordination relations are given. Next, RM_WF_Net modeling for intradepartment processes is investigated and cross-department coordination patterns, including message interaction pattern, resource interaction pattern, task collaboration pattern, procedure abstract, service outsourcing pattern, and process activation pattern, are formally defined. The soundness of the RM_WF_Net is verified based on the reachability graph. A running case of the cross-department medical diagnosis business process is given to validate our proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Petri nets are suitable for modeling and analysis of business processes. However, the lack of data concepts often makes Petri-net-based models excessively large and difficult to analyze especially when process logic is sensitive to changes of process attribute values. Emergency treatment processes are a typical example of this situation. To solve the aforementioned problems, this paper proposes a new hierarchical Petri net model for modeling and verification of emergency treatment processes. The hierarchical Petri net model includes three separate but closely related models, i.e., a business process logic net, a business process semantic net, and a set of case models. Business process logic nets are used to model the task dependencies disregarding semantic information. Business process semantic nets introduce data concepts to business process logic nets to model semantic information such as process attributes or conditions of sequence flows. Case models are used to model the practical routes of specific business instances. Based on the three models, a formal verification algorithm of an emergency treatment process is presented. Finally, the hierarchical modeling and verification methods are validated by an emergency treatment process of highways under snow/ice weather conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]