VERIFAS: A Practical Verifier for Artifact Systems

Abstract: Data-driven workflows, of which IBM's Business Artifacts are a prime exponent, have been successfully deployed in practice, adopted in industrial standards, and have spawned a rich body of research in academia, focused primarily on static analysis. The present research bridges the gap between the theory and practice of artifact verification with VERIFAS, the first implementation of practical significance of an artifact verifier with full support for unbounded data. VERIFAS verifies within seconds linear-time temporal properties over real-world and synthetic workflows of complexity in the range recommended by software engineering practice. Compared to our previous implementation based on the widely-used Spin model checker, VERIFAS not only supports a model with richer data manipulations but also outperforms it by over an order of magnitude. VERIFAS' good performance is due to a novel symbolic representation approach and a family of specialized optimizations.