From Artifacts to Activities

We consider services as units in interorganizational business processes. Following trends in the business process management community, we switch from an activity-centric description of processes to artifact-centric descriptions. In the interorganizational setting, unique problems arise. For instance, an artifact hub that is crucial for present-day enactment of artifact-centric processes, can hardly be shared between different organizations since the stored information may be subject to trade secrets. We propose a solution that involves the translation of an artifact-centric model into an activity-centric model. In this course, we consider artifacts as entities that may be sent around between organizations. The location of an artifact may imply access restrictions for one or the other organization. We propose both a formal model and algorithms to show the effectiveness of our approach.