Hierarchical Reachability Analysis for Workflow-Nets

Performance analysis is a critical component of workflow system management. Workflow models represented in Petri net have advantages of abundant analysis techniques available. Reachability analysis is useful to detect errorneous states of the business logic, however, it has the problem of state explosion. In this paper, we propose the method of hierarchical reachability analysis for workflow models represented in classical Petri net, even for the cases with cycles. Our method allows analyzing with smaller decomposed reachability graphs, each composed of less places, without losing relevant information. In this way, the proposed method conducts reachability analysis efficiently within each smaller block and with simplified upper layer models after abstraction rather than tracing the large one of the whole model