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Business artifacts with guard-stage-milestone lifecycles: managing artifact interactions with conditions and events

Published: 11 July 2011 Publication History

Abstract

A promising approach to managing business operations is based on business artifacts, a.k.a. business entities (with lifecycles). These are key conceptual entities that are central to guiding the operations of a business, and whose content changes as they move through those operations. An artifact type includes both an information model that captures all of the business-relevant data about entities of that type, and a lifecycle model, that specifies the possible ways an entity of that type might progress through the business. Two recent papers have introduced and studied the Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM) meta-model for artifact lifecycles. GSM lifecycles are substantially more declarative than the finite state machine variants studied in most previous work, and support hierarchy and parallelism within a single artifact instance. This paper presents the formal operational semantics of GSM, with an emphasis on how interaction between artifact instances is supported. Such interactions are supported both through testing of conditions against the artifact instances, and through events stemming from changes in artifact instances. Building on a previous result for the single artifact instance case, a key result here shows the equivalence of three different formulations of the GSM semantics for artifact instance interaction. One formulation is based on incremental application of ECA-like rules, one is based on two mathematical properties, and one is based on the use of first-order logic formulas.

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cover image ACM Conferences
DEBS '11: Proceedings of the 5th ACM international conference on Distributed event-based system
July 2011
418 pages
ISBN:9781450304238
DOI:10.1145/2002259
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 11 July 2011

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Author Tags

  1. business artifact
  2. business entity with lifecycle
  3. business operations management
  4. business process management
  5. case management
  6. data-centric workflow
  7. declarative workflow
  8. event-condition-action systems

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DEBS '11 Paper Acceptance Rate 23 of 95 submissions, 24%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 145 of 583 submissions, 25%

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Cited By

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  • (2025)Unraveling the Never-Ending Story of Lifecycles and Vitalizing ProcessesEnterprise Design, Operations, and Computing. EDOC 2024 Workshops10.1007/978-3-031-79059-1_5(68-81)Online publication date: 9-Feb-2025
  • (2024)Extracting Process-Aware Decision Models from Object-Centric Process DataInformation Sciences10.1016/j.ins.2024.121263(121263)Online publication date: Jul-2024
  • (2024)iDOCEM: defining a common terminology for object-centric event logging and data-centric process modellingSoftware and Systems Modeling10.1007/s10270-024-01191-zOnline publication date: 9-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Object-Centric Event Logs: Characteristics, Comparative Analysis and Road MapBusiness Process Management Forum10.1007/978-3-031-70418-5_3(37-54)Online publication date: 30-Aug-2024
  • (2023)A Unified Conceptual Model Based on Business Artifacts for Information Systems2023 24th International Arab Conference on Information Technology (ACIT)10.1109/ACIT58888.2023.10453796(1-9)Online publication date: 6-Dec-2023
  • (2023)Evaluating user acceptance of knowledge-intensive business process modeling languagesSoftware and Systems Modeling10.1007/s10270-023-01120-622:6(1803-1826)Online publication date: 2-Aug-2023
  • (2023)Discovering Guard Stage Milestone Models Through Hierarchical ClusteringCooperative Information Systems10.1007/978-3-031-46846-9_13(239-256)Online publication date: 25-Oct-2023
  • (2023)Aligning Object-Centric Event Logs with Data-Centric Conceptual ModelsEnterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling10.1007/978-3-031-34241-7_4(44-59)Online publication date: 31-May-2023
  • (2022)Domain Model Based Design of Business Process ArchitecturesApplied Sciences10.3390/app1205256312:5(2563)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2022
  • (2022)Extracting Artifact-Centric Event Logs From Blockchain Applications2022 IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC)10.1109/SCC55611.2022.00048(274-283)Online publication date: Jul-2022
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