Towards workflow verification

Workflow Management Systems (WfMS) that help the design and deployment of automated business processes as well as aid their execution and monitoring continue to evolve. Many WfMS use Workflow Patterns as their basic modeling constructs; however, the absence of verification facilities in most WfMS causes the resulting implementation to be at risk of undesirable runtime executions. Model Checking can facilitate the verification of workflow models, provided that we can conveniently implement the workflow model and provide the resources to handle the space requirement of the model. DiVinE is a distributed and parallel Model Checker that can effectively handle the well-known state explosion problem of this domain. In this paper, we present a translation of a collection of established Workflow Patterns into DVE, the input specification language of DiVinE. Thus, by assembling the corresponding DVE translated patterns into a whole model, we can verify properties of workflow models. We discuss the difficulties we have experienced with this approach and explain how that led to the development of an automatic translator tool from YAWL to DVE. We present two case studies and some ongoing work in our research group.