Recognizing Valid Artifacts in Business Processes

Abstract

Recognizing violations is a key issue in business process management (BPM). As a result that artifact-centric approach is becoming the development trend of BPM, we present a resolution for finding business violations through recognizing valid artifacts in business processes. We provide the formal definition of artifacts and artifact lifecycles, and, based on them, formulize the problem of recognizing valid artifacts. Previous methods for resolving this problem mainly put focus on activities in business process and lose the attention for data. In this work we concentrate on both the evolution of artifacts (data) and services (activities) applied on artifacts to identify the frontier between decidability and undecidability of the problem of recognizing valid artifacts. And we present the results of decidability under the conditions that artifact lifecycles are described in regular artifact lifecycle expressions and pushdown automata.