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International Conference on Business Process Management

BPM 2010: Business Process Management pp 260–275Cite as

Symbolic Execution of Acyclic Workflow Graphs

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 6336))

Abstract

We propose a new technique to analyze the control-flow, i.e., the workflow graph of a business process model, which we call symbolic execution. We consider acyclic workflow graphs that may contain inclusive OR gateways and define a symbolic execution for them that runs in quadratic time. The result allows us to decide in quadratic time, for any pair of control-flow edges or tasks of the workflow graph, whether they are sometimes, never, or always reached concurrently. This has different applications in finding control- and data-flow errors. In particular, we show how to decide soundness of an acyclic workflow graph with inclusive OR gateways in quadratic time. Moreover, we show that symbolic execution provides diagnostic information that allows the user to efficiently deal with spurious errors that arise due to over-approximation of the data-based decisions in the process.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. IBM Research, Zurich

    Cédric Favre & Hagen Völzer

Authors
  1. Cédric Favre
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  2. Hagen Völzer
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. IBM Research, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, 19 Skyline Drive, 10532, Hawthorne, NY, USA

    Richard Hull

  2. Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099, Berlin, Germany

    Jan Mendling

  3. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Englerstraße 11, Gebäude 11.40, 76131, Karlsruhe,, Germany

    Stefan Tai

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Favre, C., Völzer, H. (2010). Symbolic Execution of Acyclic Workflow Graphs. In: Hull, R., Mendling, J., Tai, S. (eds) Business Process Management. BPM 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6336. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15618-2_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15618-2_19

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-15617-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-15618-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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