Veriication Problems in Conceptual Workkow Speciications

Most of today's business requirements can only be accomplished through integration of various autonomous systems which were initially designed to serve the needs of particular applications. In the literature workkows are proposed to design these kinds of applications. The key tool for designing such applications is a powerful conceptual speciication language. Such a language should be capable of capturing interactions and cooperation between component tasks of workkows among others. These include sequential execution, iteration, choice, parallelism and synchronisation. The central focus of this paper is the veriica-tion of such process control aspects in conceptual workkow speciications. As it is generally agreed upon that the later in the software development process an error is detected, the more it will cost to correct it, it is of vital importance to detect errors as early as possible in the systems development process. In this paper some typical veriication problems in workkow speciications are identi-ed and their complexity is addressed. It will be proven that some fundamental problems are not tractable and we will show what restriction is needed to allow termination problems to be recognized in polynomial time.