Enforcing Constraints on Life Cycles of Business Artifacts

Artifact-centric business process models allow to describe artifacts (data objects) and their life cycles, which allow designers to focus on individual artifact in business processes, thus simplifies the design and analysis of business process model. However, this feature is a double-edged sword. The description of the relationships between artifacts becomes a new and nontrivial problem. It is better that the associations among business artifacts are specified at a high level as logical assertions. We think taking business constraints as complements of artifact-centric business operational model is an useful idea. Based on this consideration,in this paper, we propose an approach which combines both the declarative way and the procedural way in the construction of business processes. This flexibility can help designers to separate the parts of a business process that are more likely to change from those that are less likely to change. We propose a language TiLE to specify business constraints, and give complexity results on the satisfiability of TiLE. Moreover, we discussed how to enforce the constraints at run-time.