Petri Net Transformations for Business Processes - A Survey

In Process-Aware Information Systems, business processes are often modeled in an explicit way. Roughly speaking, the available business process modeling languages can be divided into two groups. Languages from the first group are preferred by academic people but shunned by business people, and include Petri nets and process algebras. These academic languages have a proper formal semantics, which allows the corresponding academic models to be verified in a formal way. Languages from the second group are preferred by business people but disliked by academic people, and include BPEL, BPMN, and EPCs. These business languages often lack any proper semantics, which often leads to debates on how to interpret certain business models. Nevertheless, business models are used in practice, whereas academic models are hardly used. To be able to use, for example, the abundance of Petri net verification techniques on business models, we need to be able to transform these models to Petri nets. In this paper, we investigate a number of Petri net transformations that already exist. For every transformation, we investigate the transformation itself, the constructs in the business models that are problematic for the transformation and the main applications for the transformation.