  Motivated by the response pattern for property specifications and
applications within flexible workflow management systems, we report upon an
initial study of modal and mixed transition systems in which the must
transitions are interpreted as must eventually, and in which implementations
can contain may behaviors that are resolved at run-time. We propose Transition
Systems with Responses (TSRs) as a suitable model for this study. We prove that
TSRs correspond to a restricted class of mixed transition systems, which we
refer to as the action-deterministic mixed transition systems. We show that
TSRs allow for a natural definition of deadlocked and accepting states. We then
transfer the standard definition of refinement for mixed transition systems to
TSRs and prove that refinement does not preserve deadlock freedom. This leads
to the proposal of safe refinements, which are those that preserve deadlock
freedom. We exemplify the use of TSRs and (safe) refinements on a small
medication workflow.
