Temporal consistency management of artifact-centric business processes

Time is a crucial factor in business process management. Business processes fail to accomplish when temporal inconsistency occurs between participants. Traditional temporal consistency verification methods only focus on available temporal information of web services, and the temporal constraint, which requires that the next service must be available after all previous services accomplish, is too strong. In artifact centric business process management, artifact plays the same important role as task and thus its impact on temporal consistency needs to be taken into account. In this paper, we propose a model named Timed Artifact-centric Net (TiArtiNet) based on color petri net to specify and manage the temporal consistency, with data-related temporal attributes included. A set of temporal policies are defined, and based on which, algorithms for temporal consistency check at both design time and runtime are developed. The proposed method effectively solves the problem of temporal modeling and verification of artifact-centric business processes.