R. Meersman et al. (Eds.): OTM 2010, Part I, LNCS 6426, pp. 26–43, 2010.
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010
A Process View Framework for Artifact-Centric
Business Processes
Sira Yongchareon and Chengfei Liu
Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
{syongchareon,cliu}@swin.edu.au
Abstract. Over the past several years, the artifact-centric approach to workflow
has emerged as a new paradigm of business process modelling. It provides a ro-
bust structure of workflow and supports the flexibility of workflow enactment
and evolution especially in a collaborative environment. To facilitate and foster
business collaborations, the customisation, privacy protection, and authority
control of business processes are essential. Given the diverse requirements of
different roles involved in business processes, providing various views with
adequate process information is critical to effective business process manage-
ment. Several approaches have been proposed to construct views for traditional
process-centric business processes; however, no approach has been developed
for artifact-centric processes. The declarative manner of process modelling in
artifact-centric approaches makes view construction challenging. In this paper,
we propose a novel process view framework for artifact-centric business proc-
esses. The framework consists of artifact-centric process models, view models,
and a mechanism to derive views from underlying process models. Consistency
rules are also defined to preserve the consistency between a constructed view
and its base process model.
1 Introduction
The artifact-centric business process model has emerged as a new promising approach
for modeling business processes, as it provides a highly flexible solution to capture
operational specifications of business processes. It particularly focuses on describing
the data of business processes, known as “artifacts”, by characterizing business-
relevant data objects, their lifecycles, and related services. The artifact-centric process
modelling approach fosters the automation of the business operations and supports the
flexibility of the workflow enactment and evolution [1, 7, 10, 11]. Further, it also ef-
fectively enables collaboration of the business processes as the lifecycle of an artifact
may span multiple business units when it evolves through the process. Each time the
artifact moves from one state to another state, its relevant information/data is updated.
Services that update on the artifact can be performed by various roles of participants,
which may belong to a single organization or different organizations. Given the diver-
sity of the participants involved in business processes, providing various views with
adequate information of artifacts and business processes to participants according to