Consistency of business process models and object life cycles

Abstract

Business process models and object life cycles can provide two different views on behavior of the same system, requiring that these models are consistent with each other. However, it is difficult to reason about consistency of these two types of models since their relation is not well-understood. We clarify this relation and propose an approach to establishing the required consistency. Object state changes are first made explicit in a business process model and then the process model is used to generate life cycles for each object type used in the process. We define two consistency notions for a process model and an object life cycle and express these in terms of conditions that must hold between a given life cycle and a life cycle generated from the process model. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.