A Framework for Integrating Human Processes with Business Artifacts

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) and Business Process Modeling (BPM) have become foundation for many practical business applications, and received more and more attention from both industry and research community. The purpose of BPM is to develop powerful yet intuitive frameworks for specifying real world business processes. The combination of SOC and BPM produce new challenge on how to model business processes from service view in order to bridge the gap between business and IT. This paper presents a Human-Process/Artifact framework for formalizing business processes. In this framework, a business process is modeled as interactions among a set of human processes and a set of (business) artifacts, as well as some repositories serving as storages and archives. Both artifacts and human processes can be seen as services. We give rigorous definitions for these concepts and their well-formedness conditions, and use an example to illustrate the usefulness of the model. Additionally, we give a formal semantics for the model.