On the Complexity of Some Verification Problems in Process Control Specifications

Many techniques in many diverse areas in computer science, such as process modelling, process programming, decision support systems and workflow systems, use concepts for the specification of process control. These typically include concepts for the specification of sequential execution, parallelism, synchronization and moments of choice. This paper identifies some typical verification problems in process control specifications, such as reachability, termination, freedom of deadlock and livelock, and determines their computational complexity. These results then provide computational lower bounds for any technique using these concepts for process control.