Properties and Decision Procedure for Bridge-Less Workflow Nets

Abstract

Many actual systems, e.g. computer programs, can be modeled as a subclass of Petri nets, called bridge-less workflow nets. For bridge-less workflow nets, we revealed the following properties: (i) any acyclic bridge-less workflow net is free choice; (ii) an acyclic bridge-less workflow net is sound iff it is well-structured; and (iii) any sound bridge-less workflow net is well-structured. We also proposed a necessary and sufficient condition to decide whether a given workflow net is bridge-less, and then constructed a polynomial-time procedure for it.