English

The complexity of soundness in workflow nets

Logic in Computer Science 2022-01-17 v1

Abstract

Workflow nets are a popular variant of Petri nets that allow for algorithmic formal analysis of business processes. The central decision problems concerning workflow nets deal with soundness, where the initial and final configurations are specified. Intuitively, soundness states that from every reachable configuration one can reach the final configuration. We settle the widely open complexity of the three main variants of soundness: classical, structural and generalised soundness. The first two are EXPSPACE-complete, and, surprisingly, the latter is PSPACE-complete, thus computationally simpler.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2201.05588,
  title  = {The complexity of soundness in workflow nets},
  author = {Michael Blondin and Filip Mazowiecki and Philip Offtermatt},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.05588},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

16 pages, 6 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-24T08:50:27.176Z