ArtiMate:一种以Artifact为中心的多粒度协作流程建模方法

Arti Mate: an Artifact-centric Modeling Approach for Collaborative Business Processes with Multiple Granularities

业务流程是组合服务的主要表现形式之一.跨组织多方协作流程往往包含多重粒度,难以基于任何单一粒度建模.Proclets方法将多粒度单体流程分解为一组交互协作的单粒度流程,以实例的基数、多重性来约束其间的交互关系.然而,在此类方法中如何体现流程业务目标与业务进展,支持复杂且多变的协作关系,准确刻画模型的执行语义等问题尚缺乏有效的建模技术.提出一种以Artifact为中心的多粒度协作流程建模方法 Arti Mate:继承proclets的粒度分解思路但以Artifact为中心建模各单粒度流程artilet,利于刻画业务目标,追踪业务进展;解耦交互机制和交互策略,以丰富、插件式交互策略polilet连接较为稳定的artilet,复用实质性业务流程并适应协作需求变化;以着色Petri网描述的Arti Mate的执行语义,有利于建模方法的实现和仿真确认.论文以国家海洋局东海分局会签类应用为案例,检验了Arti Mate方法的可行性和有效性.

Business processes are the main manifestation of composite services. Generally,business processes are collaborative, span o- ver different organizations, and tend to be complex with diverse granularities. It is difficult to model them properly with any definite scale of granularities. Typical solutions, such as proclets, try to tack/e the problem by splitting a traditional monolithic process into a set of interacting processes in terms of cardinality, multiplicity, and other constraints. However, many issues still remain unresolved, inclu- ding how to capture the business goal, and/or measure the progress of a process, how to support complex collaborative patterns in ever changing environments, how to accurately characterize the formal semantics of these models, etc. In this paper, we propose an Artifact- centric approach, ArtiMate,to model collaborative business processes with diverse granularities. Inherited from the basic idea of pro- clets,the ArtiMate splits a complex case into several collaborative processes （ so-called artilets that represent the essential operational business） but takes the Artifact-Centric perspective, which facilitates the characterization of business goals as well as working pro- gress. Further, the ArtiMate decouples collaborative strategies from mechanisms so as to use rich and pluggable collaborative policies （polilets） to meet changing collaboration requirements with maximal reusability of involved artilets. Finally, a Colored Petri Net （ CPN } interpretation of the ArtiMate model makes the proposed approach easier to be realized or validated by simulation. A case study of the countersigning-centered processes in the East China Sea Branch of the State Oceanic Administration （ EB-SCA） justifies the feasibility and effectiveness of the ArtiMate.