Artifact-centric Business Process Research Articles

Embedding reactive behavior into artifact-centric business process models

In artifact-centric business process models it is usually assumed that the specification of the activities requires stating all the effects of the activity execution over the information base (i.e. over the artifacts it handles). In particular, these effects have to deal with integrity constraint enforcement to ensure a proper treatment of integrity constraints during activity execution. Manually specifying this treatment is a difficult, expensive and error-prone task, because of the inherent difficulty of getting rid of all the implication entailed by the constraints and also of the way to properly handle it.In this paper, we advocate for separating constraint handling from the specification of activities in such a way that only the effects of the activity over the artifacts have to be defined (without needing to care about the constraints). Then, we propose an approach to automatically generate an extension to the original business process model that allows identifying at run-time the additional updates that have to be applied to the information base to repair all constraint violations caused by the activity execution.

A contract-based workflow execution framework for realizing artifact-centric business processes in a dynamic and collaborative environment

PurposeThe paper aims to study realization requirements for the flexible enactment of artifact-centric business processes in a dynamic, collaborative environment and to develop a workflow execution framework that can effectively address those requirements.Design/methodology/approachThis study proposed a framework and contract-based, event-driven architecture design and implementation that can directly realize collaborative artifact-centric business processes in service-oriented architecture (SOA) without any model conversion.FindingsThe results show that the approach is feasible in presenting several key benefits over the use of existing workflow systems to run artifact-centric processes.Originality/valueMost of the existing approaches require an artifact-centric model to be transformed into executable workflow languages to run on existing workflow management systems. This study argues that the model conversion can incur losses of information and affect traceability and monitoring ability of workflows, especially in an SOA where a workflow can span across multiple inter-business entities.

Reusing artifact-centric business process models: a behavioral consistent specialization approach

Process reuse is one of the important research areas that address efficiency issues in business process modeling. Similar to software reuse, business processes should be able to be componentized and specialized in order to enable flexible process expansion and customization. Current activity/control-flow centric workflow modeling approaches face difficulty in supporting highly flexible process reuse, limited by their procedural nature. In comparison, the emerging artifact-centric workflow modeling approach well fits into these reuse requirements. Beyond the classic class level reuse in existing object-oriented approaches, process reuse faces the challenge of handling synchronization dependencies among artifact lifecycles as parts of a business process. In this article, we propose a theoretical framework for business process specialization that comprises an artifact-centric business process model, a set of methods to design and construct a specialized business process model from a base model, and a set of behavioral consistency criteria to help check the consistency between the two process models.

Verification of behavioral soundness for artifact-centric business process model with synchronizations

Abstract A correct business process model is the key to achieving a business goal through business process management. In recent years, artifacts have been proposed as a paradigm to capture dynamic and inter-organizational processes in a more natural way. In artifact-centric modeling approach, a business process is modeled as interaction of the involved artifact lifecycles, in which the control flows are implicit in business rules. The interaction significantly complicates the process execution due to synchronizations, which poses great challenges for the verification of one fundamental correctness criteria: behavioral soundness. This paper aims to address this problem, i.e., the verification of behavioral soundness for an artifact-centric process model with synchronizations. First, each artifact lifecycle involved is mapped to a Petri net representation. Then we propose the rules to integrate the Petri nets into a workflow net based on the synchronization constraints. With the workflow net, a reachability graph is calculated to derive all the implicitly specified service execution sequences. Finally, the behavioral soundness (i.e., proper completion) is checked by verifying whether every specified service execution sequence can complete properly or not from its control flow and data flow respectively. A case study is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

The Adaptation of a Model of an Artifact-Centric Business Process Instance and Its Validation

The adaptability of an in-progress business process is an essential requirement for any business process management system in dynamic business process environments. Over the last two decades, the artifact-centric approach for business process management has been evidenced to have higher level of flexibility. However, the adaptation of a model of an artifact-centric business process instance is still inevitable and pervasive due to the complex and ever-changing business environments. Almost all works of artifact-centric business process neglect this issue. To fill this gap, we propose a special business rule called adaptation rule to address the dynamic adaptation problem and describe the adaptation by a global adaptation model. Moreover, we provide a validation mechanism over our proposed adaptation rule of the global adaptation model to guarantee the behavior correctness of the adaptation. Through this validation approach, computing the lifecycle of the global adaptation model can be avoided.

Conformance checking in UML artifact-centric business process models

Business artifacts have appeared as a new paradigm to capture the information required for the complete execution and reasoning of a business process. Likewise, conformance checking is gaining popularity as a crucial technique that enables evaluating whether recorded executions of a process match its corresponding model. In this paper, conformance checking techniques are incorporated into a general framework to specify business artifacts. By relying on the expressive power of an artifact-centric specification, BAUML, which combines UML state and activity diagrams (among others), the problem of conformance checking can be mapped into the Petri net formalism and its results be explained in terms of the original artifact-centric specification. In contrast to most existing approaches, ours incorporates data constraints into the Petri nets, thus achieving conformance results which are more precise. We have also implemented a plug-in, within the ProM framework, which is able to translate a BAUML into a Petri net to perform conformance checking. This shows the feasibility of our approach.

Deriving user interface flow models for artifact-centric business processes

Artifact-centric business process modeling is emerging as a promising paradigm for modeling data-intensive business processes as it provides higher flexibility and extensibility support in comparison to the traditional activity-centric modeling paradigm. Several approaches exist on (semi-) automatically generating user interface (UI) models for activity-centric processes. However, little work has been done on generating UI models for artifact-centric processes. In this paper, we propose a framework for deriving user-interface flow models to help visualize artifact-centric processes and support semi-automatic creation of UIs. The UI model is created by taking into account the relationships among business processes, user interfaces, and user roles in an artifact-centric process model. Algorithms are also developed to derive UI flow models from an artifact-centric process model. We have conducted experiments and implemented a prototype system to prove our concept and evaluate the feasibility and technical performance of our approach.

Ensuring the semantic correctness of a BAUML artifact-centric BPM

ContextUsing models to represent business processes provides several advantages, such as facilitating the communication between the stakeholders or being able to check the correctness of the processes before their implementation. In contrast to traditional process modeling approaches, the artifact-centric approach treats data as a key element of the process, also considering the tasks or activities that are performed in it. ObjectiveThis paper presents a way to verify and validate the semantic correctness of an artifact-centric business process model defined using a combination of UML and OCL models - a BAUML model. MethodWe achieve our goal by presenting several algorithms that encode the initial models into first-order logic, which then allows to use an existing satisfiability checking tool to determine their correctness. ResultsAn approach to verify and validate an artifact-centric BPM specified in BAUML, which uses a combination of UML and OCL models. To do this, we provide a method to translate all BAUML components into a set of logic formulas. The result of this translation ensures that the only changes allowed are those specified in the model, and that those changes are taking place according the order established by the model. Having obtained this logic representation, these models can be validated by any existing reasoning method able to deal with negation of derived predicates. Moreover, we show how to automatically generate the relevant tests to validate the models. We also show the feasibility of our approach by implementing a prototype tool and applying it to a running example. ConclusionIt is feasible to ensure the semantic correctness of an artifact-centric business process model in practice.

Toward Activity Mapping for Artifact-Centric Business Process

The existing method of task mapping between process models is mostly based on the similarity of labels to get the similarity between tasks, which is affected by a single factor and easy to cause errors. This paper proposes a task mapping method for Artifact-Centric business process analyzes the data operation in business process execution. At first we add the description of data operation to EZ-Flow model. Secondly select the similar artifact attributes of the two business artifact by whole artifacts similarity calculation and based them to calculate two tasks’ similarity by label similarity, artifact operation similarity and context similarity calculations. Finally, the task mapping comes from the optimal selection of tasks’ similarities. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of the method, and show that the method reflects the data operation characteristics of business process model, as artifact task mapping of the process model provides a feasible method.

Guest editorial: special issue on data and artifact-centric business processes

Guest editorial: special issue on data and artifact-centric business processes

Automating correctness verification of artifact-centric business process models

ContextThe artifact-centric methodology has emerged as a new paradigm to support business process management over the last few years. This way, business processes are described from the point of view of the artifacts that are manipulated during the process. ObjectiveOne of the research challenges in this area is the verification of the correctness of this kind of business process models where the model is formed of various artifacts that interact among them. MethodIn this paper, we propose a fully automated approach for verifying correctness of artifact-centric business process models, taking into account that the state (lifecycle) and the values of each artifact (numerical data described by pre and postconditions) influence in the values and the state of the others. The lifecycles of the artifacts and the numerical data managed are modeled by using the Constraint Programming paradigm, an Artificial Intelligence technique. ResultsTwo correctness notions for artifact-centric business process models are distinguished (reachability and weak termination), and novel verification algorithms are developed to check them. The algorithms are complete: neither false positives nor false negatives are generated. Moreover, the algorithms offer precise diagnosis of the detected errors, indicating the execution causing the error where the lifecycle gets stuck. ConclusionTo the best of our knowledge, this paper presents the first verification approach for artifact-centric business process models that integrates pre and postconditions, which define the behavior of the services, and numerical data verification when the model is formed of more than one artifact. The approach can detect errors not detectable with other approaches.

Compliance by design for artifact-centric business processes

Compliance to legal regulations, internal policies, or best practices is becoming a more and more important aspect in business processes management. Compliance requirements are usually formulated in a set of rules that can be checked during or after the execution of the business process, called compliance by detection. If noncompliant behavior is detected, the business process needs to be redesigned. Alternatively, the rules can be already taken into account while modeling the business process to result in a business process that is compliant by design. This technique has the advantage that a subsequent verification of compliance is not required.This paper focuses on compliance by design and employs an artifact-centric approach. In this school of thought, business processes are not described as a sequence of tasks to be performed (i.e., imperatively), but from the point of view of the artifacts that are manipulated during the process (i.e., declaratively). We extend the artifact-centric approach to model compliance rules and show how compliant business processes can be synthesized automatically.

A Graph Similarity Matching Algorithm for Artifact-Centric Business Process Models

A Graph Similarity Matching Algorithm for Artifact-Centric Business Process Models

Representations of Artifact-Centric Business Processes

Current approaches to the representation of business processes can be divided into two major categories, referred to as activity-centric and artifact-centric. The former underline the tasks as the basic units of work, and the latter stress the importance of the life cycles of the artifacts (i.e., the business entities). This paper analyzes the major issues that characterize the artifact-centric approach, i.e., structure, dynamics and coordination. These issues can be dealt with in various ways, ranging from separate models to holistic ones. The pros and cons of separate models and compact ones are analyzed on the basis of how they cope with three relevant aspects, i.e., aggregation, synchronization and matching. A number of motivating examples are presented along with the notation used to define them. This notation, named ARTS (ARtifacts and TAsks), considers both artifacts and tasks as first-class citizens of business process models.

Formal approach to a web information system based on story algebra

Web Information Systems (WIS) are becoming more and more ubiquitous along with the changes in information technology. There have already been several studies on modeling various aspects of WIS. This paper attempts to investigate the most recent paradigms of WIS description taking into account the Web service approaches, Service Oriented Architecture and Cloud computing. One of the modeling and analysis approaches is the Artifact Centric Business Process that unifies both the behavioural and information aspects of business processes carried out in a WIS environment. The information aspect frequently incorporates in the form of unstructured or semi-structured document that indirectly influences the content of the underlying database through several tiers of the given architecture. A business event stimulates a business process along with some set of data and triggers a process at the user interface level. The process initiates a chain of processes that goes through the tiers of architecture until the content of the database is affected. The Story Algebra, or more generally the Process Algebra approach provides a formal framework that promises a formal describing method for modeling precisely the event triggered processes coupled with data in document format.