Introducing the Guard-Stage-Milestone Approach for Specifying Business Entity Lifecycles

Abstract

Abstract.A promising approach to managing business operations is based on business entities with lifecycles (BEL's) (a.k.a. business artifacts), i.e., key conceptual entities that are central to guiding the operations of a business, and whose content changes as they move through those operations. A BEL type includes both an information model that captures, in either materialized or virtual form, all of the business-relevant data about entities of that type, and a lifecycle model, that specifies the possible ways an entity of that type might progress through the business by responding to events and invoking services, including human activities. Most previous work on BEL's has focused on the use of lifecycle models based on variants of finite state machines. This paper introduces the Guard-StageMilestone (GSM) meta-model for lifecycles, which is an evolution of the previous work on BEL's. GSM lifecycles are substantially more declarative than the finite state machine variants, and support hierarchy and parallelism within a single entity instance. The GSM operational semantics are based on a form of EventCondition-Action (ECA) rules, and provide a basis for formal verification and reasoning. This paper provides an informal, preliminary introduction to the GSM approach, and briefly overviews selected research directions.

Improving Understandability of Declarative Process Models by Revealing Hidden Dependencies

“…During this procedure, all incoming Existence and Choice constraints (as in 2) are stored as well (Algorithm 2, lines [16][17][18]. They also need to be fulfilled, but do not propagate due to their unary nature.…”

“…Some competing approaches exist such as DCR Graphs [16], which are comparable to a slimmeddown version of Declare for improving understandability and setup, and the more data-oriented language Guard-Stage Milestone [17]. Declare and its understandability has been researched for a test case-driven approach [4], the impact of hierarchies [1], and its common understandability challenges [2].…”

Specifying Artifact-Centric Business Process Models in UML

“…For instance, [4,5,6] represent the business artifact and its lifecycle in one model, GSM, that includes the artifact's attributes. However, the relationships between artifacts are not made explicit.…”

“…However, it is possible to use edges as a macro. GSM was first defined in [4] and further studied and formalized in [5,6].…”

“…Currently, several alternatives have been proposed to model artifact-centric business processes, such as Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM) models [4,5,6], BPMN with data [7] or PHILharmonic Flows [8], to mention a few examples. However, as we will see, these approaches either do not use the same language to represent all the dimensions or the chosen representation is not graphical -it is often based on some variant of logic -making the models difficult to understand.…”