A view framework for modeling and change validation of artifact-centric inter-organizational business processes

Abstract

Over the past several years, more efficient approaches have been on increasing demands for designing, modeling, and implementing inter-organizational business processes. In the process collaboration across organizational boundaries, organizations still stay autonomic, which means each organization can freely modify its internal operations to meet its private goals while satisfying the mutual objectives with its partners. Recently, artifact-centric process modeling has been evidenced with higher flexibility in process modeling and execution than traditional activity-centric modeling methods. Although some efforts have been put to exploring how artifact-centric modeling facilitates the collaboration between organizations, the achievement is still far from satisfaction level, particularly in aspects of process modeling and validating. To fill in the gaps, we propose a view framework for modeling and validating the changes of inter-organizational business processes. The framework consists of an artifact-centric process meta-model, public view constructing mechanism, and private view and change validating mechanisms, which are specially designed to facilitate the participating organizations to customize their internal operations while ensuring the correctness of the collaborating processes. We also implement a software tool named Artifact-M to help organizations to automatically construct a minimal and consistent public view from their processes.