Searching for Deviations in Trading Systems: Combining Control-Flow and Data Perspectives

Abstract: Trading systems are software platforms that support the exchange of securities (e.g., company shares) between participants. In this paper, we present a method to search for deviations in trading systems by checking conformance between colored Petri nets and event logs. Colored Petri nets (CPNs) are an extension of Petri nets, a formalism for modeling of distributed systems. CPNs allow us to describe an expected causal ordering between system activities and how data attributes of domain-related objects (e.g., orders to trade) must be transformed. Event logs consist of traces corresponding to runs of a real system. By comparing CPNs and event logs, different types of deviations can be detected. Using this method, we report the validation of a real-life trading system.