A Process View Framework for Artifact-Centric Business Processes

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 robust 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 management. 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 processes. 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.