Transforming Control-Flow Patterns of YAWL to Petri Nets

YAWL is one of the powerful workflow modelling languages due to its support of the most frequent control-flow patterns found in the current business process modelling. The workflow patterns ease the business process designer to specify complex workflows, especially for the advanced control-flow patterns such as the region cancellation and the OR-join constructs. Given a YAWL workflow pattern, it is crucial to determine whether the pattern could exhibit certain desirable behaviors at the design time. In this paper, we propose a scheme to transform YAWL's control-flow patterns into the Petri nets. The Petri nets provide the efficient mean to do the simulation and verification of the desirable behaviors. The basic control-flow patterns, advanced branching and synchronization patterns, structural patterns, state-based patterns, and cancellation patterns of the YAWL workflow are covered. Finally, we ensure that the critical paths of the state space of the resulting Petri nets are correct and equivalent to the original YAWL workflow patterns.