Specification and Verification of Artifact Behaviors in Business Process Models

SOA has influenced business process modeling and management. Recent business process models have elevated data representation to the same level as control flows, for example, the artifact-centric business process models allow the life cycle properties of artifacts (data objects) to be specified and analyzed. In this paper, we develop a specification language ABSL based on computation tree logic for artifact life cycle behaviors (e.g., reachability). We show that given a business model and starting configuration, it can be decided if an ABSL sentence is satisfied when the domains are bounded, and if an ABSL-core (sublanguage of ABSL) sentence is satisfied when the domains are totally ordered but unbounded. We also show that if the starting configuration is not given, ABSL(-core) is still decidable if the number of artifacts is bounded with bounded (resp. unbounded but ordered) domains.