How to guarantee compliance between workflows and product lifecycles?

Abstract

Abstract. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems are widely used in the manufacturing industry. A core feature of such systems is providing support for versioning of product data. As workflow functionality is increasingly used in PLM systems the possibility emerges that versioning policies as encapsulated in process models are inconsistent with respect to their actual lifecycles. In this paper we define compliance of object versioning lifecycles with respect to process models and provide a solution to automatically checking whether compliance holds.

Improving business process intelligence by observing object state transitions

“…As an example, we refer to our treatment process described in Section 2 and shown in Fig. 1. (iii) Furthermore, conformance between process models that utilize data objects and the corresponding organization-wide object life cycles is required ensuring data-compliant and deadlock-free execution of processes [12,24,25].…”

Modeling and Enacting Complex Data Dependencies in Business Processes

“…With execution semantics one can automatically enact processes with complex data dependencies from a model only. Finally, an integrated conceptual model allows for analyzing control and data flow combined regarding their consistency [11,23] and correctness. Also different process representations can be generated automatically, for instance, models showing how a data object evolves throughout a process [9,13].…”

Weak Conformance between Process Models and Synchronized Object Life Cycles

“…First, we compare different approaches to check for conformance between a process model and object life cycles. Table 4.1 lists the applicability and specifies the time complexity of the computation algorithms for approaches described in [13,26], [31], [18], and this paper. The notion from [13,26] requires fully specified process models and abstracts from inter-dependencies between object life cycles by not considering them for conformance checking in case they are modeled.…”

“…[13] introduces compliance between a process model and an object life cycle as the combination of object life cycle conformance (all data state transitions induced in the process model must occur in the object life cycle) and coverage (opposite containment relation). [31] introduces conformance checking between process models and product life cycles, which in fact are object life cycles, because a product life cycle determines for a product the states and the allowed state transitions. Compared to the notion of weak conformance, both notions do not support data synchronization and both set restrictions with respect to data constraints specification in the process model.…”

“…This approach has some restrictions with respect to data constraint specification, because each single change of a data object as specified in the object life cycle, we refer to as data state transition, must be performed by some activity. [31] relaxes this limitation such that several state changes can be subsumed within one activity. However, gaps within the data constraints specification, i.e.…”