An approach to merge collaborating processes of an inter-organizational business process for artifact lifecycle synthesis

Abstract

Artifact-centric approach to business process modeling has received considerable attention for elevating data logic to the same level as the process flow logic. With the emergence of this modeling paradigm, several recent works have focused on synthesizing the indispensable lifecycles of key business entities called artifacts from the standalone activity-centric processes. However, synthesizing artifact lifecycles from the inter-organizational business processes (IOBP) is challenging, as the artifacts and states are shared among two or more collaborating processes. Thus, unlike a standalone process, the synthesis of artifact lifecycles from an IOBP require the process interactions to be captured by preserving the dependencies between the involved artifacts and states in the resulting lifecycles. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an automated approach that aims at merging the collaborating processes of an IOBP in order to support the synthesis of artifact lifecycles from an IOBP. The proposed approach is comprised of algorithms that combine the nodes of collaborating processes to generate an integrated process that can be used to synthesize the artifact lifecycles pertinent to an IOBP. We demonstrate the proposed approach using an e-business process scenario and the validity is proved using theorems and a prototype implementation.