Cross-case data objects in business processes: Semantics and analysis

Abstract

Business Process Management (BPM) provides methods and techniques to design, analyze, and enact business processes. An assumption in BPM has been that data objects are not shared among cases. Surprisingly, this often unquestioned assumption is violated in many real-world business processes. For instance, a budget data object can be read and modified by all ordering processes. These cross-case data objects have significant consequences on process modeling and verification. This paper provides a framework to describe and reason about cross-case data objects by presenting a dedicated execution semantics. Based on this framework, k-soundness is extended to cover multiple cases that share data. The paper reports on an implementation that translates BPMN process models extended with cross-case data objects to Coloured Petri nets, to properly capture their semantics.