Description

Nowadays, organizations model their operations with business processes. Traditionally, business processes are modeled as activity-centric business process models in which activities are focused on and data  just serve as inputs and outputs of some services. They follow the imperative principles, implying that the workflow of the activities can be defined at design time. But for some types of problems, it is easier to represent how the data are modified during the process execution instead of the activities that execute the data evolution.  For this reason, the artifact-centric methodology (data-centric approach) has emerged as a new paradigm to support business process management, where business artifacts appeared for the necessity of enrich the business process model with information about data, providing a way for understanding the interplay between data and process. Artifacts are business-relevant objects that are created, evolved, and (typically) archived as they pass througth a business process, combining both data aspects and process aspects into a holistic unit.

Artifact-centric modeling establishes data objects (called artifacts) and their lifecycles as focus of the business process modeling. This type of modeling is inherently declarative: the control flow of the business process is not explicitly modeled, but follows from the lifecycles of the artifacts.

ARTist aims to provide a graphical and user-friendly tool for artifact-centric business process modeling. ARTist integrates mechanisms to verify the correctness of artifact-centric business process models at design time, including the state relation between the artifacts of the model, and the data values that define the relations between them.