Sufficient and Necessary Condition to Decide Compatibility for a Class of Interorganizational Workflow Nets

Interorganizational Workflow nets (IWF-nets) can well model many concurrent systems such as web service composition, in which multiple processes interact via sending/receiving messages. Compatibility of IWF-nets is a crucial criterion for the correctness of these systems. It guarantees that a system has no deadlock, livelock, or dead tasks. In our previous work we proved that the compatibility problem is PSPACE-complete for safe IWF-nets. This paper defines a subclass of IWF-nets that can model many cases about interactions. Necessary and sufficient condition is presented to decide their compatibility, and it depends on the net structures only. Finally, an algorithm is developed based on the condition.