Petri Nets and Business Process Management

The management of business processes comprises their planning, specification, modeling, analysis and computer-supported execution. Current trends in information technology such as workflow management systems or packaged software systems indicate the increasing importance of a systematic approach to business process management. Many graphical notations are in everyday use for business modeling purposes, usually resembling some version of data flow diagrams. Often, the lack of formal semantics and methodological support limits their computerbased analysis and execution. In most cases, the design and the improvement of business processes in industrial applications does with intuition and experience of experts only. Petri nets have been in use as a graphical modeling language for more than 30 years. Mathematical analysis techniques allow for analytical verification of many relevant properties of systems’ behaviour. Petri nets nevertheless are seldom used in business applications. Even the few commercially available Petri net based software development tools exploit Petri net theory to a very limited extend only. There is an apparent gap between practical needs of business process management in industry and theoretical investigations of Petri nets in the academic sector. Recently, different variants of Petri nets have been suggested for various purposes in the context of business processes: As a reference language for the semantics of other, formal or semi-formal modeling languages, or as a means to compare and relate different modeling languages, or as a tool to execute process models, or in order to check reachability of distinguished states. Central problems of this area include: