Expressing Pre-, Post-conditions, Attributes and Business Constraints in Artifact-Centric Business Processes Using Object Role Modeling

摘要

Artifact-centric modeling is a good alternative to rigid modeling techniques (e.g., formalization) for business processes. First introduced by a research initiative of IBM, this approach has grown up considerably and drawn a lot of research interests from both academics and practitioners. Making context explicit by relating the control flow of business processes to business entities is one of many advantages of being artifact-centric in modeling business processes. Quite often, semi-formal techniques and diagrams are combined in artifact-centric modeling in order to capture both the behavior and data. We argue that the expressiveness of this approach could even be furthered by making a few modeling elements (e.g., attributes, rules, conditions) more intuitive in this approach. In this paper, we propose a modeling technique that represents these elements diagrammatically. We have chosen the Object Role Modeling language to represent pre-, post-conditions of tasks, artifact attributes and business constraints. The resulting models (of business processes) are purely diagrammatically described, as opposed to the hybrid nature of most work on artifact-centric business process modeling.