A new extended Petri-net for business process modeling

In this paper a new extended Petri-net (EPNet) was proposed for the requirements of business process modeling. EPNet is powerful in expression and analysis. EPNet extended the workflow net (WF_net) by adding some new elements and the corresponding mechanisms. All workflow patterns can be directly supported in EPNet. D element was introduced in EPNet for recording instance runtime relevant data. C relation was added to describe computing and communication among D elements and tasks. Task was split into three parts: entry function, body function, exit function. Jumping, composite, multi-instance, triggering were four new attributes of a task. In analysis, the soundness of EPNet consisted of consistency verification and analysis of liveness and boundness of corresponding Petri-net. Finally, an industrial application example was introduced to illustrate how to apply the proposed EPNet to model a real business process.