An Artifact-centric View-based Approach to Modeling Inter-organizational Business Processes

1. Sira Yongchareon1
, Chengfei Liu1
, and Xiaohui Zhao2
1
Faculty of Information & Communication Technologies
Swinburne University of Technology, Australia
2
Faculty of Creative Industries and Business
Unitec Institute of Technology, New Zealand
An Artifact-centric View-based
Approach to Modeling Inter-
organizational Business Processes
WISE’11, 12-14 October 2011, Sydney, Australia

2. WISE’11, 12-14 October 2011, Sydney, Australia
Sira Yongchareon, Chengfei Liu, and Xiaohui Zhao 2
 Introduction & Related works
 Motivation & Issues
 Artifact-centric Collaboration Model (ACC model)
 ACC Construction method – a view-based approach
 ACC Verification
 Changes and Validation
 Conclusion
Outline

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 Inter-organizational workflows
Introduction : Inter-org workflows
Taken from Chebbi, I, et al. Data & Knowledge Engineering 56 (2006)

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 Public view can be used to facilitate the inter-org coordination
Introduction : Inter-org workflows
Taken from Chebbi, I, et al. Data & Knowledge Engineering 56 (2006)

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 Process view framework for (traditional) inter-org workflow
management
Introduction : Inter-org workflows
From Jiang, P, et al. Advanced Engineering Informatics 24 (2010)

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 Issues on current task-based approaches
 Process still inflexible? Due to procedural nature of task-based model
(and contract)
 How to ensure that the changes can preserve both local and global goals?
 Contract not formed by goals of all participants, but their task interactions
 Data related issues? Due to lack of holistic view of data in the model
 Most control decisions made based on “data”  How to preserve the
integrity and consistency of data effected by the change of tasks?
 How key data interested by business stakeholders can be modelled and
monitored?
 Artifact-centric workflow modeling  an emerging and
promising approach that can tackle those issues
Introduction : An emerging approach

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Introduction : Artifact-centric model
 Business Artifacts and their lifecycle – Purchasing
process example
 The purchasing process starts when a buyer places a purchase order
to a supplier for particular products and it ends when the buyer pays an
invoice.
 The shipping process starts when the supplier requests a logistic to
create a shipping order and it ends when the items arrives to the buyer

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Introduction : How they glued together
 Business rules – to associate artifacts and tasks
sync rule

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Introduction : High-level framework
 4-Dimensional Framework for Artifact-Centric Business
Process Modeling (Hull, R., CoopIS 2008)
 Business artifacts
 Macro Lifecycles
 Services (Tasks)
 Associations

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Introduction : Artifacts in inter-org
 Business Artifacts in the inter-org processes
 Local artifact – involved in a single org (cross-department is possible)
 Shared artifact – involved cross-organizational process  Part of a
“message” passing between orgs?
 What are the “concerns” in the collaborative environment?
 Flexibility  Need to allow organization to freely change and implement its own
responsible part of the collaboration
 Autonomy  Changes can be done locally and privately without revealing any
private parts to others
 Compliance  Changes made to the private parts conform to the “agreed
contract” and do not interfere the overall process

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Issues and challenges?
 How to define/model inter-org processes by using
artifact-centric modeling approach
 How to guarantee a desired behavior of inter-org
processes
 How to validate changes occurring within local
processes but may impact the overall collaboration

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 From Private view to Public view to “Service Contract”
 To achieve high-degree of autonomy, flexibility, and compliance
of inter-org processes
Process view approach
Taken from van der Aalst, W.M.P., et al. The Computer Journal 53(1) (2010)

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 Construct private view – a complete (concrete) local
process owned by each individual organization
 Construct public view of local process – an abstracted
version of private view that is publicly visible to every
organization
 By applying state condensation technique on the lifecycle of artifact
(Yongchareon, S. et al., CoopIS 2010)
 Construct ACC model - an integration of all views in the
collaboration
Construction method

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 Private/Public view construction - Running example.
Purchasing process consists of three core artifacts: Purchase
Order, Shipping Order, and Invoice
 The purchasing process starts when a buyer places a purchase order to a
supplier for particular products and it ends when the buyer pays an invoice.
 The shipping process starts when the supplier requests a logistic to create a
shipping order and it ends when the items arrives to the buyer
Construction method

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 Private/Public view construction – Buyer’s view
 Buyer’s private process consists of Purchase Order, Quote, and
Invoice artifacts
 Purchase Order and Invoice are shared artifacts
 Quote is local artifact (belong only to Buyer’s local process)
Construction method
Synchronization dependency
Private-to-public view abstraction
we denote it as p(buyer)

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 Private/Public view construction – Supplier’s view
 Supplier’s private process consists of Purchase Order, Picking List,
Shipping Order, and Invoice artifacts
 Notice changes in Purchase Order  Buyer’s local part disappear
Construction method
Buyer’s view
Buyer’s view

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 Private/Public view construction – Logistics’ view
 Logistics' private process consists of Purchase Order, Shipping List,
and Shipping Order artifacts
 Notice NO Invoice artifact
Construction method

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 Private ACC Model Construction
 Integrate private view of each organization in the collaboration
Construction method
vbuyer + vsupplier+ vlogistics= vACC

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 Public ACC Model Construction
 Integrate public view of each organization in the collaboration
Construction method
p(vbuyer ) + p(vsupplier ) + p(vlogistics ) = p(vACC )

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Model verification
 Traditional compositional model verification approach
can be used for the behavior verification of ACC model
(e.g., LIND-NIELSEN, J., Formal Methods in System Design 2001)
 “soundness”  guarantee the desired and correct
behavior of overall process
 Local soundness vs. Global soundness
 Local soundness  soundness of individual private view
 Global soundness  soundness of ACC model

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Model verification
 Artifact lifecycle and ACC lifecycle
1) Artifact lifecycle  generated by interpreting BRs
2) ACC lifecycle  generated by using compositional technique

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Model verification
 Given two lifecycles, we can compose them into new
composed lifecycle
 There inference rules for combined transition formation

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Model verification
 Lifecycle of ACC is “sound” if it is:
 safe
 for every business rule r in ACC, r induces one and only one
transition
 and goal-reachable
 For every state s in ACC, there exists final state sf in ACC such that
s is reachable from the initial state and sfis reachable from s
 For every final state sf in ACC, sfis reachable from the initial state

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Process changes
 Changes can be made locally on the private view
 Refinement  Replace states or a transition of shared artifact
with new sub-lifecycle (called Lifecycle fragment or L-fragment)
 Lifecycle refinement and synchronization refinement
 Extension  Add new local artifact(s) with the synchronization to
some existing artifact in the process

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Process changes
 Examples of changes in process
Several possible
ways of
refinement with
extension

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Process changes
 Issues?
 How to guarantee valid changes  the result of refinement/extension
preserves the global soundness of the collaboration
 Compositional model verification
 Unrealistic to access local artifacts owned by other organizations
 Is expensive and leads to state exposition problem
 We propose to validate the process locally but can assert
global soundness, i.e., Validating individual private view based on
local modification

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Process changes : Validation
 Change Validation Framework  “View conformance”
(covers)
conforms to

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Process changes : Validation
 The modified private view must be behavioral-
consistent to its original private view
 Consistency checking by lifecycle coverage checking
 (a) is public view and (b), (c), and (d) are private views of (a) with
lifecycle modification
 (a) is covered by (c) and (d), but not (b)  (c) and (d) are consistent
to (a)
 Notice this is observation consistency

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ACC Model : Validating changes
 Key questions….
 How to ensure that changes make a modified private view
consistent to its original view?
 We need to guarantee that every change is valid by imposing
construction rules on both “refinement” and “extension”
 Refinement consistency  can adapt from SESE block checking in
programming language verification
 Extension consistency  By imposing refinement consistency checking
and consistent synchronization rules

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ACC Model : Validating changes
 Synchronization consistency checking
 Locally-bound lifecycle  When an extended artifact totally syncs
within the refined SESE L-fragment
 Transitivity  Extended artifact syncs within another locally-bound
extended artifact

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ACC Model : Conclusion
 Artifact-centric Collaboration model
 Private/Public view construction
 Model verification
 Changes and validation
 Valid change  Modified private view consistent to its original private
view and conforms to the public ACC
 Consistent “refinement” and “extension”
 What’s this all about?
 Organization is flexible and free to change and implement its own
part without revealing its private/sensitive information to other
organization while still preserving global correctness of the
collaboration

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Open Challenges
 Realization approach?
 On traditional “task-based” workflow system
 Need model-model transformation, e.g., ArtiFlow  BPEL (Narendra,
N.C., SCC 2009 and Liu, G., ICSOC 2009)
 Pose loss of information and degrade flexibility (of business rules)
 Inefficiency in Monitoring/Tracking due to model conversion/mapping
 Alternative?  Pure artifact-centric workflow system
 Process driven by pure business rule engine (SOA supported)
 Artifact-centric model can be directly (fully automated)
executed
 Efficient-level of flexibility and monitoring ability

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Open Challenges
 Our current developing work “A Framework for Automated
Realization of Artifact-centric Business Processes in SOA”
 ACP Realization framework
 ACP System architecture
To be appeared in the proceeding of DASFAA 2012To be appeared in the proceeding of DASFAA 2012

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Thank you