Barcelona: A Design and Runtime Environment for Declarative Artifact-Centric BPM

A promising approach to managing business operations is based on business artifacts, a.k.a. business entities with lifecycles [8, 6]. These are key conceptual entities that are central to guiding the operations of a business, and whose content changes as they move through those operations. A business artifact type is modeled using a an information model, which is intended to hold all business-relevant data about entities of this type, and b a lifecycle model, which is intended to hold the possible ways that an entity of this type might progress through the business. In 2010 a declarative style of business artifact lifecycles, called Guard-Stage-Milestone GSM, was introduced [4, 5]. GSM has since been adopted [7] to form the conceptual basis of the OMG Case Management Model and Notation CMMN standard [1]. The Barcelona component of the recently open-sourced [2] ArtiFact system supports both design-time and run-time environments for GSM. Both of these will be illustrated in the proposed demo.