Towards Formal Analysis of Artifact-Centric Business Process Models

Abstract

Business process (BP) modeling is a building block for design and management of business processes. Two fundamental aspects of BP modeling are: a formal framework that well integrates both control flow and data, and a set of tools to assist all phases of a BP life cycle. This paper is an initial attempt to address both aspects of BP modeling. We view our investigation as a precursor to the development of a framework and tools that enable automated construction of processes, along the lines of techniques developed around OWL-S and Semantic Web Services.Over the last decade, an artifact-centric approach of coupling control and data emerged in the practice of BP design. It focuses on the "moving" data as they are manipulated throughout a process. In this paper, we formulate a formal model for artifact-centric business processes and develop complexity results concerning static analysis of three problems of immediate practical concerns, which focus on the ability to complete an execution, existence of an execution "deadend", and redundancy. We show that the problems are undecidable in general, but under various restrictions they are decidable but complete in PSPACE, co-NP, and NP; and in some cases decidable in linear time.

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 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.…”

A Formal Approach for Business Processes Description, Customization and Automation

“…An emerging approach uses artifacts and Petri Nets, that combine data and process is the Business Artifacts (BA) [6]- [7]. According to the formalization developed in [7], the BA approach focuses on solving decision problems, related to reachability, avoiding dead-ends and redundancy [6] but it does not provide a graphical notation for process modeling.…”

Applying Enterprise Architecture to Business Networks

“…Rich sets of artifacts and tools can be used to support these activities inside the organization. Bhattacharya et al [2007] maintained the same view, defining business artifacts as information entities that capture process goals and objectives and that allow for evaluating how thoroughly these goals are achieved. Overall, business artifacts encapsulate essential information.…”