BUCKER: A basic unfolding based checker for soundness of workflow systems

Abstract

Soundness is an important property of WF-net (workflow net). It guarantees the correct execution of workflow systems without deadlocks or livelocks. The traditional method of verifying soundness is based on reachability graph. However, it suffers from the state space explosion problem. The unfolding technique of Petri nets can effectively alleviate this problem. Our previous work proposed the concept of basic unfolding and gave a necessary and sufficient condition to decide soundness based on it. This paper introduces the related tool we developed. After a WF-net is input in this tool, its basic unfolding can be generated, and then its soundness can be verified. Moreover, some cases show the effectiveness of our tool, and we also give some experiments to illustrate the advantages of the basic unfolding technique compared with the reachability graph technique.