Open Petri Nets as Semantic Model for Business Process Integration

One important application of Petri nets is thespecification of workflows. Such a specification is needed, for example, when interoperability of the workflows is an issue, which is frequently the case when business processes of different organizations shall be integrated.A workflow net is a Petri net satisfying some structural constraints, like the existence of one initial and one final place, and a corresponding soundness condition.An interorganizational workflow is modeled as a set of such workflow nets connected through additional places for asynchronous communication and synchronization requirements on transitions.In this contribution we interpret an interorganizational workflow as acomposition of open nets. This allows us to project processes of the overall net to open processes of the local nets and,vice versa, to deduce the global behavior from the behavior of the components.Such a compositional uunderstanding of workflows can be used to simulate and test local workflow nets in an unknown environment, and it provides the semantic justification for reusable components.