An artifact-centric business process execution platform

Abstract

Artifact-centric modeling has become an alternative, yet promising approach of business process (BP) modeling and management as it provides higher flexibility than that of traditional activity-centric approaches. However, existing BP execution engines require artifact-centric models be transformed to executable activity-centric BP languages (e.g., BPEL) in order to be executed and managed. We argue that the model conversion incurs losses of information and affects traceability and monitoring ability of BPs, especially where BPs span across inter-organizations. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of an execution platform for artifact-centric BPs. We evaluated our platform using a case study and that can demonstrate several key benefits over the use of existing systems to run artifact-centric BPs.