Research On Validity Of Artifact In Business Process

Data-centric BPM is an important branch in the field of BPM, and the representativeone is Artifact-oriented BPM that is put forward by IBM. As the core data entity in theprocess, Artifact has the dynamic time-changed property. The state of Artifact is closelyrelated to the situation of process enactment, so it is a key problem to validate the validityof Artifact. The problem of validity of Artifact includes two aspects. One situation is thevalidation of Artifact states in a given moment in business process, and the other one is tovalidate the validity of Artifact with its whole lifecycle.Firstly, during the runtime of business process, the research on validation of Artifactneed analyse the corresponding process of Artifact to get the business request at the givenmoment according to logic relations. Then the corresponding snapshots of Artifact can becaptured from the record database of process. We can get a conclusion by judgingwhether the snapshot and the relative business request are consistent.Secondly, when the business process has finished running, all the Artifact snapshotswould be saved in the record database of process. And a snapshot inferring tree can beconstructed with these snapshots which can reflect the changes of Artifact in its wholelifecycle. In addition, the logic operation model ArtiFlow of Artifact will be analyzedbased on Time Petri Net, and the business request reachability tree can be also obtainedusing the property of reachability tree of Petri Net. As a result, the validation of Artifactcan be transformed to a comparison of two trees. We can get a conclusion whether theArtifact is valid in its whole lifecycle by comparing the snapshot inferring tree with thebusiness request reachability tree.Finally, the algorithms presented in this paper are verified with an actual case.Moreover, the function of process checking is implemented in the Artifact-oriented BPMsystem, which proves that the feasibility of the method proposed in this paper.