Detecting data-flow errors based on Petri nets with data operations

Dongming Xiang, Guanjun Liu, Chungang Yan, Changjun Jiang

Abstract: In order to guarantee the correctness of business processes, not only control-flow errors but also data-flow errors should be considered. The control-flow errors mainly focus on deadlock, livelock, soundness, and so on. However, there are not too many methods for detecting data-flow errors. This paper defines Petri nets with data operations ( PN-DO ) that can model the operations on data such as read, write and delete. Based on PN-DO, we define some data-flow errors in this paper. We construct a reachability graph with data operations for each PN-DO, and then propose a method to reduce the reachability graph. Based on the reduced reachability graph, data-flow errors can be detected rapidly. A case study is given to illustrate the effectiveness of our methods.