Research on Workflow Patterns based on Petri nets

Workflow patterns systematically address workflow requirements, from basic to complex. Some complicated patterns of it were not supported directly by existing workflow management systems and workflow languages. Petri nets perform better when it comes to state-based workflow patterns. However, some patterns are also not easy to map onto Petri nets. This inspired us to develop a new extended workflow net (EWFnet) based on Petri nets for formalizing workflow patterns. EWFnet extended workflow net (WFnet) by adding some mechanisms. EWFnet improved the power of describing dynamic workflow model of WFnet. Control variable was introduced in EWFnet for describing the relevant data of workflow model. In EWFnet, a special transition was introduced for supporting dynamic routing of model. The correctness analysis of EWFnet consists of the analysis of consistent and the analysis of soundness of corresponding WFnet. Finally, an application example was described and analyzed in EWFnet which show its power of description and analysis