Towards Formal Analysis of Artifact-Centric Business Process Models

Business process (BP) modeling is a building block for design andmanagement of business processes. Two fundamental aspects of BP modelingare: a formal framework that well integrates both control flow and data, and a setof tools to assist all phases of a BP life cycle. This paper is an initial attempt toaddress both aspects of BP modeling. We view our investigation as a precursor tothe development of a framework and tools that enable automated construction ofprocesses, along the lines of techniques developed around OWL-S and SemanticWeb Services. Over the last decade, an artifact-centric approach of coupling control and dataemerged in the practice of BP design. It focuses on the "moving" data as they aremanipulated throughout a process. In this paper, we formulate a formal modelfor artifact-centric business processes and develop complexity results concerningstatic analysis of three problems of immediate practical concerns, which focus onthe ability to complete an execution, existence of an execution "deadend", andredundancy. We show that the problems are undecidable in general, but undervarious restrictions they are decidable but complete in PSPACE, co-NP, and NP;and in some cases decidable in linear time.