Detecting Infeasible Traces in Process Models

Workflow testing is an important method of workflow analysis in design time. A challenging problem with trace-oriented test data generation in particular and trace-based workflow analysis in general is the existence of infeasible traces for which there is no input data for them to be executed. In this paper we build on the theory of workflow nets and introduce workflow nets where transitions have conditions associated with them. We then demonstrate that we can determine which execution traces, that are possible according to the controlflow dependencies, are actually possible taking the data perspective into account. This way we are able to more accurately determine in design time the infeasible traces caused by the correlation between transition conditions along this trace. Finally, we provide a solution to automatically detecting the shortest infeasible trace.