Modeling and Analysis of Real-Time Cooperative Systems Using Petri Nets

The existing formal techniques are not suitable for elegantly modeling passing value indeterminacy and describing batch processing function in real-time cooperative systems. Moreover, the correct behavior of the systems depends on not only the logical correctness of the results obtained through running workflows but also the time of producing them before critical deadlines. For these purposes, this paper proposes an interorganizational logical workflow net (ILWN) for modeling and analyzing real-time cooperative systems based on time Petri nets, workflow techniques, and temporal logic. Through attaching logical expressions to some actions of an ILWN model, the size of the model is reduced. Thus, ILWNs can efficiently mitigate the state explosion problem to some extent. Also, this paper analyzes the soundness of a subclass of ILWNs: the or-restricted ILWNs. A rigorous analysis approach is given based on their static net structures only. The concepts and techniques proposed in this paper are illustrated with a seller-buyer example in electronic commerce.