Artifact systems with data dependencies and arithmetic

Specifying Artifact-Centric Business Process Models in UML

“…Many authors opt for a database schema [26,11,27,28,7], while others consider artifacts as a set of attributes or variables [29,12,30,3]. Another alternative is to add an ontology represented by means of description logics on top of a relational database [31].…”

“…Finally, some works opt for using a variable to store the artifact's state [12,29]. Although it is an explicit representation, it only stores the current state of the artifact, instead of showing how it will evolve from one stage to the next.…”

“…In [12], preconditions determine the execution of the actions; as such, they act as associations. As they are defined in logic, they are formal and unambiguous.…”

“…In general,they are described by using pre and postconditions (also called effects). Different variants of logic are used in [26,11,12,29,30,27,31] for this purpose. [28,5] omit the preconditions.…”

“…Our approach allows also automated reasoning from the business process models (as shown on [9,10]), while most of the existing proposals that handle reasoning are based on models which use languages grounded on complex mathematical notations [11,12,13] which are not practical at the business level.…”