Synthesis of Artifact Lifecycles from Activity-centric Process Models

In recent years, artifact-centric business process modeling is gaining momentum with its improved flexibility and extensibility. In order to support the rapid translation of the traditional activity-centric processes into this new type of processes, this paper proposes a novel approach to automatically transforming an activity-centric process model into a group of lifecycles of artifacts and their interactions, which represent the behavior of its corresponding artifact-centric process model. Algorithms on translating an activity-centric process model into a tree model, finding the dependencies between two object/artifact states based on the tree model, and synthesizing the lifecycles of artifacts have been proposed. Throughout the paper, we illustrate our approach with an order processing running scenario.