Consistency of Business Process Models and Object Life Cycles

Abstract

Abstract. Business process models and object life cycles can provide two different views on behavior of the same system, requiring that these models are consistent with each other. However, it is difficult to reason about consistency of these two types of models since their relation is not well-understood. We clarify this relation and propose an approach to establishing the required consistency. Object state changes are first made explicit in a business process model and then the process model is used to generate life cycles for each object type used in the process. We define two consistency notions for a process model and an object life cycle and express these in terms of conditions that must hold between a given life cycle and a life cycle generated from the process model.

Exploring Features of a Full-Coverage Integrated Solution for Business Process Compliance

“…For instance, Cabanillas et al have developed a procedure aimed at making datarelated compliance checking easier by automatically generating a data-centered view of business processes [14]. This view can be used as input of algorithms to check for data-related compliance problems such as those described in [15]. Taking all this into account, a full-coverage BPCMS should contain the next features:…”

Weak Conformance between Process Models and Synchronized Object Life Cycles

“…The notion of weak conformance has been initially proposed in [18] as extension to the notion of object life cycle conformance [13,26] to allow the support of underspecified process models. A fully specified process model contains all reads and writes of data nodes by all activities.…”

“…First, we compare different approaches to check for conformance between a process model and object life cycles. Table 4.1 lists the applicability and specifies the time complexity of the computation algorithms for approaches described in [13,26], [31], [18], and this paper. The notion from [13,26] requires fully specified process models and abstracts from inter-dependencies between object life cycles by not considering them for conformance checking in case they are modeled.…”

“…Otherwise, the execution of a process model may deadlock. To check for deadlock-free execution in terms of data constraints, the notion of object life cycle conformance [13,26] is used. This approach has some restrictions with respect to data constraint specification, because each single change of a data object as specified in the object life cycle, we refer to as data state transition, must be performed by some activity.…”

“…[12] introduces the essential requirements of this modeling paradigm. [13,26] present an approach, which connects object life cycles with process models by determining commonalities between both representations and transforming one into the other. Covering one direction of the integration, [14] derives object life cycles from process models considering synchronization between actions (state transitions).…”