DOI 10.1007/s00165-010-0161-4 The Author(s) © 2010. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Formal Aspects Formal Aspects of Computing (2011) 23: 333–363 of Computing Soundness of workflow nets: classification, decidability, and analysis W. M. P. van der Aalst1,2,K.M.vanHee1, A. H. M. ter Hofstede1,2,N.Sidorova1, H. M. W. Verbeek1, M. Voorhoeve1 andM.T.Wynn2 1 Eindhoven University of Technology, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands. E-mail:
[email protected] 2 Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia Abstract. Workflow nets, a particular class of Petri nets, have become one of the standard ways to model and analyze workflows. Typically, they are used as an abstraction of the workflow that is used to check the so-called soundness property. This property guarantees the absence of livelocks, deadlocks, and other anomalies that can be detected without domain knowledge. Several authors have proposed alternative notions of soundness and have suggested to use more expressive languages, e.g., models with cancellations or priorities. This paper provides an overview of the different notions of soundness and investigates these in the presence of different extensions of workflow nets. We will show that the eight soundness notions described in the literature are decidable for workflow nets. However, most extensions will make all of these notions undecidable. These new results show the theoretical limits of workflow verification. Moreover, we discuss some of the analysis approaches described in the literature. Keywords: Petri nets, Decidability, Workflow nets, Reset nets, Soundness, Verification 1.