The complexity of soundness in workflow nets

Speaker(s)

Filip Mazowiecki

Affiliation

MIM UW

Date

May 11, 2022, 2:15 p.m.

Room

room 5050

Seminar

Seminar Automata Theory

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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. If I have time I'll briefly discuss how we use continuous reachability to implement the problems (and why it's not as obvious as it seems). Based on joint works with Michael Blondin and Philip Offtermatt.

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