Artifact-centric business process models in UML

Abstract

Business process modeling using an artifact-centric approach has raised a significant interest over the last few years. This approach is usually stated in terms of the BALSA framework which defines the four "dimensions" of an artifact-centric business process model: Business Artifacts, Lifecycles, Services and Associations. One of the research challenges in this area is looking for different diagrams to represent these dimensions. Bearing this in mind, the present paper shows how all the elements in BALSA can be represented by using the UML language. The advantages of using UML are many. First of all, it is a formal language with a precise semantics. Secondly, it is widely used and understandable by both business people and software developers. And, last but not least, UML allows us to provide an artifact-centric specification for BALSA which incorporates also some aspects of process-awareness. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.