Parallel processing for business artifacts with declarative lifecycles

Abstract

The business artifact (a.k.a. business entity) approach to modeling and implementing business operations and processes is based on a holistic marriage of data and process and enables a factoring of business operations based on key business-relevant conceptual entities. The recently introduced Guard-Stage- Milestone (GSM) artifact meta-model provides a hierarchical and declarative basis for specifying artifact lifecycles, and is substantially influencing OMG's emerging Case Management Modeling Notation standard. In previous papers one characterization of the operational semantics for GSM is based on the incremental, strictly serial firing of Event-Condition-Action (ECA) like rules. This paper develops a parallel algorithm equivalent to the sequential one in terms of externally observable characteristics. Optimizations and analysis for the parallel algorithm are discussed. This paper also introduces a simplification of the GSM meta-model that provides more flexibility and makes checking for well-formedness of GSM models simpler and more intuitive than in the preceding works on GSM. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.