An automaton-based approach to the verification of timed workflow schemas

Nowadays, the ability of providing an automated support to the management of business processes is commonly recognized as a main competitive factor for companies. One of the most critical resources to deal with is time, but, unfortunately, the time management support offered by most workflow systems is rather limited. In this paper we focus our attention on the modeling and verification of workflows extended with time constraints. We propose timed automata as an effective tool to specify timed workflow schemas and to check their consistency.