A Survey on Approaches to Modeling Artifact-Centric Business Processes

Business Process Modeling using artifact-centric approach has gained increasing interest over the past few years. The ability to put data and process aspects on an equal footing has made it a powerful tool for efficient business process modeling. The artifact-centric approach is based on key business-relevant entities called business artifacts, which are central for guiding business operations as they navigate through the business operations. The artifact-centric modeling approach can be laid in a four dimensional framework called BALSA for defining business processes, where the four dimensions include business artifacts, lifecycles, services and associations. Based on this data-centric paradigm, several artifact-centric meta-models have been emerged in the recent years. Although all the proposed models claim to support the artifact-centric approach, their support in specifying the BALSA elements of artifacts was not clearly described in the existing literature. This paper reviews all existing approaches to artifact-centric modeling and also discuss to what extent they align with the BALSA framework.