Process-centric views of data-driven business artifacts

Declarative, data-aware workflow models are becoming increasingly pervasive. While these have numerous benefits, classical process-centric specifications retain certain advantages. Workflow designers are used to development tools such as BPMN or UML diagrams, that focus on control flow. Views describing valid sequences of tasks are also useful to provide stakeholders with high-level descriptions of the workflow, stripped of the accompanying data. In this paper we study the problem of recovering process-centric views from declarative, data-aware workflow specifications in a variant of IBM's business artifact model. We focus on the simplest process-centric views, specified by finite-state transition systems, describing regular languages. The results characterize when process-centric views of artifact systems are regular, using both linear and branching-time semantics. We also study the impact of data dependencies on regularity of the views. As a side effect, we obtain several new results on verification of business artifacts, including a decidability result for branching-time properties. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.