Abstract. Business process (BP) modeling is a building block for design and management of business processes. Two fundamental aspects of BP modeling are: a formal framework that well integrates both control flow and data, and a set of tools to assist all phases of a BP life cycle. This paper is an initial attempt to address both aspects of BP modeling. We view our investigation as a precursor to the development of a framework and tools that enable automated construction of processes, along the lines of techniques developed around OWL-S and Semantic Web Services. Over the last decade, an artifact-centric approach of coupling control and data emerged in the practice of BP design. It focuses on the “moving ” data as they are manipulated throughout a process. In this paper, we formulate a formal model for artifact-centric business processes and develop complexity results concerning static analysis of three problems of immediate practical concerns, which focus on the ability to complete an execution, existence of an execution “deadend”, and redundancy. We show that the problems are undecidable in general, but under various restrictions they are decidable but complete in PSPACE, co-NP, and NP; and in some cases decidable in linear time. 1

We formalize and study business process systems that are centered around "business artifacts", or simply "artifacts". Artifacts are used to represent (real or conceptual) key business entities, including both their data schema and lifecycles. The lifecycle of an artifact type specifies the possible sequencings of services that can be applied to an artifact of this type as it progresses through the business process. The artifact-centric approach was introduced by IBM, and has been used to achieve substantial savings when performing business transformations. In this paper, artifacts carry attribute records and internal state relations (holding sets of tuples) that services can consult and update. In addition, services can access an underlying database and can introduce new values from an infinite domain, thus modeling external inputs or partially specified processes described by pre-and-post

Almost all medium- and large-scale businesses rely on electronic workflow systems to manage their business processes. A key challenge is to enable the easy re-use and modification of these workflow schemas and their piece-parts, so that they can be adapted to new business situations. This paper describes an approach for automatic construction (and thus, evolution) of a workflow schema that satisfies a specified condition (or “goal”), starting from a set of basic building block services (or “tasks”). We use a workflow model based on “business artifacts”, which represent key (real or conceptual) business entities, and include both the business-relevant data about them and a specification of their lifecycle, that is, how they can evolve over time as they move through the workflow as the result of services being applied to them. This paper uses a declarative form of artifact-centric workflow. The

Active XML is a high-level specification language tailored to data-intensive, distributed, dynamic Web services. Active XML is based on XML documents with embedded function calls. The state of a document evolves depending on the result of internal function calls (local computations) or external ones (interactions with users or other services). Function calls return documents that may be active, so may activate new sub-tasks. The focus of the paper is on the verification of temporal properties of runs of Active XML systems, specified in a tree-pattern based temporal logic, Tree-LTL, that allows expressing a rich class of semantic properties of the application. The main results establish the boundary of decidability and the complexity of automatic verification of Tree-LTL properties. 1

Business process integration and monitoring provides an invaluable means for an enterprise to adapt to changing conditions. However, developing such applications using traditional methods is challenging because of the intrinsic complexity of integrating large-scale business processes and existing applications. Model Driven Developmente (MDDe) is an approach to developing applications—from domainspecific models to platform-sensitive models—that bridges the gap between business processes and information technology. We describe the MDD framework and methodology used to create the IBM Business Performance Management (BPM) solution. We describe how we apply model-driven techniques to BPM and present a scenario from a pilot project in which these techniques were applied. Technical details on models and transformation are presented. Our framework uses and extends the IBM business observation metamodel and introduces a data warehouse metamodel and other platform-specific and transformational models. We discuss our lessons learned and present the general guidelines for using MDD to develop enterprise-scale applications.

We introduce a formal model for capturing the notion of mashup in its globality. The basic component in our model is the mashlet. A mashlet may query data sources, import other mashlets, use external Web services, and specify complex interaction patterns between its components. A mashlet state is modeled by a set of relations and its logic specified by datalog-style active rules. We are primarily concerned with changes in a mashlet state relations and rules. The interactions with users and other applications, as well as the consequent effects on the mashlets composition and behavior, are captured by streams of changes. The model facilitates dynamic mashlets composition, interaction and reuse, and captures the fundamental behavioral aspects of mashups. Categories and Subject Descriptors

Business Artifacts are the core entities used by businesses to record information pertinent to their operations. Business operational models are representations of the processing of business artifacts. Traditional process modeling approaches focus on the actions taken to achieve a certain goal (verb-centric). Business artifact-centric modeling starts by identifying what is acted upon (noun-centric), and constructs business operational models by identifying the tasks/actions that business actors execute to add business value. In this paper, we identify important classes of properties on artifact-centric operational models. In particular, we focus on persistence, uniqueness and arrival properties. To enable a static analysis of these properties, we propose a formal model for artifact-centric operational models. We show that the formal model guarantees persistence and uniqueness. We prove that, while checking an arrival property is undecidable in general, under a restricted version of the formalism, an arrival property can be checked in EXPTIME. 1

Abstract. SOA has influenced business process modeling and management. Recent business process models have elevated data representation to the same level as control flows, for example, the artifact-centric business process models allow the life cycle properties of artifacts (data objects) to be specified and analyzed. In this paper, we develop a specification language ABSL based on computation tree logic for artifact life cycle behaviors (e.g., reachability). We show that given a business model and starting configuration, it can be decided if an ABSL sentence is satisfied when the domains are bounded, and if an ABSL-core (sublanguage of ABSL) sentence is satisfied when the domains are totally ordered but unbounded. We also show that if the starting configuration is not given, ABSL(-core) is still decidable if the number of artifacts is bounded with bounded (resp. unbounded but ordered) domains. 1

Abstract. A fundamental promise of service oriented architecture (SOA) lies in the ease of integrating sharable information, processes, and other resources through interactions among the shared components that are modeled as web services. It is expected that not only the participating services are complex and have observable states, but the number of interacting services may be also large. Prior work on choreographies (conversation protocols) all focuses on specifying how the interacting web services should behave globally. Studies have shown that the relationships between global and local specifications of service interactions could be rather intricate. In this paper, we formulate a framework consisting of logical and implementation levels. We survey and discuss the technical problems and known results concerning service design, analysis and verification in this framework. 1

Traditional approaches to business process modeling and workflow are based on activity flows (with data often an afterthought) or documents (with processing often an afterthought). In contrast, an emerging approach uses (business) artifacts, that combine data and process in an holistic manner as the basic building block. These correspond to key business entities which evolve as they pass through the business’s operation. This short paper motivates the approach, surveys research and its applications, and discusses how principles and techniques from database management research can further develop the artifact-centric paradigm. 1