A Data-Centric Design Methodology for Business Processes

Abstract

This chapter describes a design methodology for business processes and workflows that focuses first on "business artifacts", which represent key (real or conceptual) business entities, including both the business-relevant data about them and their macro-level lifecycles. Individual workflow services (a.k.a. tasks) are then incorporated, by specifying how they operate on the artifacts and fit into their lifecycles. The resulting workflow is specified in a particular artifact-centric workflow model, which is introduced using an extended example. At the logical level this workflow model is largely declarative, in contrast with most traditional workflow models which are procedural and/or graph-based. The chapter includes a discussion of how the declarative, artifact-centric workflow specification can be mapped into an optimized physical realization.

Data Impact Analysis in Business Processes

“…The evaluation in Reijers et al (2017) addresses 14 datacentric process approaches. The approaches are categorized into three main groups: (1) Data-driven process structures (e.g., Müller et al 2007Müller et al , 2008, in which the objects involved in the process are described using a data-model (each object has a lifecycle to define its states); (2) Productbased workflow design (e.g., Reijers et al 2003;Vanderfeesten et al 2011), in which a model describes the data elements involved in the process in form of tree-like structure (the top elements in the tree are the final data elements that represent the outcome of the process); and (3) Artifact-centric process modeling (e.g., Bhattacharya et al 2009;Cohn and Hull 2009), which focuses on describing how business data (artifacts) are changed by a particular action, task, or service throughout the process (the states of an artifact are described by a lifecycle model, and an information model of the process describes all business artifacts and their relationships). The authors conclude that although there is a significant increase in developing datacentric process modelling approaches, not much attention is given to the individual needs (i.e., users' perspective usability).…”

“…When discussing and introducing data-centric process modeling approaches, Kumar (2018) mainly focuses on product-based and artifact centric approaches. These and others (e.g., Bhattacharya et al 2009 andSadiq et al 2004) tie process modeling to analysis approaches that address the data perspective and take measures to avoid data flow problems. These approaches are fundamentally centered on data rather than on control flows.…”

Formalizing Artifact-Centric Business Processes - Towards a Conformance Testing Approach

“…In this sub-section, we give a brief description of the four BALSA dimensions and theirs representation using UML diagrams. For more details see (Bhattacharya et al, 2009) (Hull et al, 2009) and (Estañol et al, 2013).…”

“…In the setting of artifact-centric business process modelling, there are three levels in the specification of the solution for a given process:  Definition of the data involved in the process,  Identification of the basic actions that manipulate those data, and  Specification of how those basic actions must be used by the process to reach the goal. BALSA framework (Bhattacharya, 2009) is an artifact-centric design methodology which is based on the definition of a Business Operation Model (BOM). These latter are defined across four explicit inter-related but separable dimensions: (1) Business Artifacts, (2) Lifecycles, (3) Services, and (4) the Associations of services to artifacts.…”

Automated transition method from ArtiFlow to ServiceFlow

“…A recent shift from process-centric to data-centric workflow specification is happening in the BPM arena and shown promising signs [1,2] . Conceptual model for data-centric workflow are emerging in business workflow, a leading approach is the artifact-centric workflow models [3,4] .…”