Conceptual Workflow Verification and Optimization for Artifact-Centric Business Process

The conceptual workflow can be taken as a middle level between the logical specification level and the physical execution level in business workflow system. The conceptual workflow is very important in providing the independency from both the business operational model and the specified implementation platform, so it supports flexible modifications both in the top level and in the bottom level. In this paper, first, a set of graphic components is proposed here to describe an artifact-centric business process and a conceptual workflow is derived from the business operational model. Then, some syntax rules are proposed for verifying the syntactical correctness of the conceptual workflow. After that several optimization rules are proposed for optimizing the conceptual workflow and the example used shows that the optimization rules can simplify the conceptual workflow thus will improve the performance of the execution of the workflow future.