An artifact-driven approach to monitor business processes through real-world objects

Abstract

Nowadays, many business processes once intra-organizational are becoming inter-organizational. Thus, being able to monitor how such processes are performed, including portions carried out by service providers, is paramount. Yet, traditional process monitoring techniques present some shortcomings when dealing with inter-organizational processes. In particular, they require human operators to notify when business activities are performed, and to stop the process when it is not executed as expected. In this paper, we address these issues by proposing an artifact-driven monitoring service, capable of autonomously and continuously monitor inter-organizational processes. To do so, this service relies on the state of the artifacts (i.e., physical entities) participating to the process, represented using the E-GSM notation. A working prototype of this service is presented and validated using real-world processes and data from the logistics domain.