Parallel Processing for Business Artifacts with Declarative Lifecycles

The business artifact (a.k.a. business entity) approach to modeling and implementing business operations and processes, unlike the traditional process-oriented approach, is based on a holistic marriage of data and process, and enables a factoring of business operations based on key business-relevant conceptual entities that progress through the business. The recently introduced Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM) artifact meta-model provides a hierarchical and declarative basis for specifying artifact lifecycles, and is substantially influencing OMG's emerging Case Management Modeling Notation standard. In GSM, milestones correspond to business-relevant operational objectives that an artifact instance might achieve, stages correspond to meaningful clusters of activity intended to achieve milestones, and guards correspond to events and/or conditions that can cause the launch of stages. The termination of stages and the achieving of milestones are governed by events and/or conditions. In previous papers one characterization of the operational semantics for GSM is based on the incremental, strictly serial firing of Event-Condition-Action (ECA) like rules. This paper develops a parallel algorithm equivalent to the sequential one in terms of externally observable characteristics. Optimizations and analysis for the parallel algorithm are discussed. This paper also introduces a simplification of the GSM meta-model that provides more flexibility and makes checking for well-formedness of GSM models simpler and more intuitive than in the preceding works on GSM.

By: Yutian Sun, Richard Hull, Roman Vaculín

Published in: RC25298 in 2012

rc25298.pdf

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