Improving the understandability of artifact-centric workflows using BPMN with extensions

Abstract

Since 2003 the enterprises have accelerated research in this approach through development of methods, tools and other technologies in support of the artifact-centric approach. The artifact-centric approach is expected to become a promising trend for business communities and practitioners, as well as for people working in information technology, to use in business process modelling. Our research provides an approach or method that can help business stakeholders to understand the artifact-centric approach.

The artifact-centric modelling is based on business rules and focuses on how business data is changed or updated by certain actions or services throughout the business process. Business rules can create an inter dependency between each artifact in the artifact centric model which makes it necessary to synchronize artifacts in order to maintain a harmony in the business processes. The issue is that the synchronised artifacts become complex and difficult to understand by business users. Therefore, in order to improve the understandability of the artifact-centric model, we propose a model transformation from synchronised artifact-centric process model to an activity-centric process model. In this thesis, we use business process modelling notation (BPMN) with an extension as our activity-centric model. This is because BPMN is the most widely-accepted process modeling standard.

To evaluate the proposed approach, we use a case study which demonstrates how a business process can be defined using artifact-centric approach and how to transform it into a BPMN with extensions. The outcome of this research can be used for business communities as they can easily comprehend an artifact-centric model and business requirements/functions during the business process modelling. Better understanding of the artifact-centric approach will help the business communities to respond and communicate more efficiently with the system analysts or information technology experts at the time of modelling business process.