A framework for behavior-consistent specialization of artifact-centric business processes

Abstract

Driven by complex and dynamic business process requirements, there has been an increasing demand for business process reuse to improve modeling efficiency. Process specialization is an effective reuse method that can be used to customize and extend base process models to specialized models. In the recent years, artifact-centric business process modeling has emerged as it supports a more flexible process structure compared with traditional activity-centric process models. Although, process specialization has been studied for the traditional models by treating a process as a single object, the specialization of artifact-centric processes that consist of multiple interacting artifacts has not been studied. Inheriting interactions among artifacts for specialized processes and ensuring the consistency of the processes are challenging. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework for process specialization comprising artifact-centric process models, methods to define a specialized process model based on an existing process model, and the behavior consistency between the specialized model and its base model. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.