Towards formal analysis of artifact-centric business process models

Kamal Bhattacharya, Cagdas Gerede, Richard Hull, Rong Liu, Jianwen Su

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

217 Scopus citations

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.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationBusiness Process Management - 5th International Conference, BPM 2007, Proceedings
Pages288-304
Number of pages17
DOIs
StatePublished - 2007
Event5th International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2007 - Brisbane, Australia
Duration: 24 Sep 200728 Sep 2007

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume4714 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference5th International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2007
Country/TerritoryAustralia
CityBrisbane
Period24/09/0728/09/07

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Towards formal analysis of artifact-centric business process models'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this