VERIFAS: A Practical Verifier for Artifact Systems

Data-driven workflows, of which IBM's Business Artifacts are a prime exponent, have been successfully deployed in practice, adopted in industrial standards, and have spawned a rich body of research in academia, focused primarily on static analysis. The present research bridges the gap between the theory and practice of artifact verification with the implementation of VERIFAS, a full-fledged and efficient artifact verifier for verifying LTL-FO properties of workflows specified in a variant of the Hierarchical Artifact System (HAS) model presented in [16]. Compared to a nontrivial Spin-based verifier implemented in our previous work [29], VERIFAS applies to a much broader class of artifacts. In addition, as shown in our experimental results on both real and synthetic workflows, our verifier has a decisive performance advantage even on the simple artifacts that the Spin-based verifier is able to handle. The significantly improved performance is due to a novel symbolic representation approach and a family of specialized optimizations to the classic Karp-Miller algorithm.

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