Satisfiability of artifact lifecycle in business process model

One of the new trends in BPM is data-centric. Business artifact is a data entity which records the business process. The approach based on artifact becomes a focus in the research of BPM. Lifecycle is a key character of artifact. Whether a business process can satisfy the defined artifact lifecycle is an important property to be checked out. In this paper, artifact lifecycle is defined by the reachability tree in Petri net. Then an artifact states tree is extracted from the business process model. To decide the satisfiability is transformed to the question of tree path inclusion and the algorithm is given.