Understanding Behavior of Business Process Models

Building real-world process models is hard, because processes having both parallelism and choice can have behavioral anomalies. Alas, the usual way to avoid these anomalies is by deening simple-minded models that inhibit parallelism, abstract away exceptional cases, or do not assure correct behavior. This paper gives a notion of correct behavior, the so-called simple control property, which implies the absence of anomalies like deadlocks or useless activities. An algebraic formalization of the concept of thread of control|related to place invariants in free-choice Petri nets|is given. Behavioral correctness is related to an appropriate mix of threads of control in the model.