Embedding reactive behavior into artifact-centric business process models

Abstract

In artifact-centric business process models it is usually assumed that the specification of the activities requires stating all the effects of the activity execution over the information base (i.e. over the artifacts it handles). In particular, these effects have to deal with integrity constraint enforcement to ensure a proper treatment of integrity constraints during activity execution. Manually specifying this treatment is a difficult, expensive and error-prone task, because of the inherent difficulty of getting rid of all the implication entailed by the constraints and also of the way to properly handle it.

In this paper, we advocate for separating constraint handling from the specification of activities in such a way that only the effects of the activity over the artifacts have to be defined (without needing to care about the constraints). Then, we propose an approach to automatically generate an extension to the original business process model that allows identifying at run-time the additional updates that have to be applied to the information base to repair all constraint violations caused by the activity execution.