Business process management, workflow, and case management are critical technologies for managing collections of services, including human activities, to support business operations. One way to manage business operations is based on business entities with lifecycles (BEL’s) (a.k.a. business artifacts), i.e., key conceptual entities that are central to guiding the operations of a business, and w...

An environment to support the modeling, analysis, simulation, and development of state transition models, SMOOCHES (State Machines for Object-Oriented Concurrent Hierarchical Engineering Specifications), is presented. SMOOCHES allows the hierarchical construction, analysis, and simulation of state transition models in an object-oriented distributed environment. Statecharts (see Harel, 1987c), a...

This paper explores the challenges related to the End-Of-Life phase of products and circular systems of reuse and recycling within the commonly established frameworks of product lifecycles. Typically, Original Equipment Manufacturer-centric supply chain perspectives neglect the complexity at the End-Of-Life where many third-parties are involved in reuse and recycling activities. Based on a revi...

The lifecycles of many products are becoming shorter and shorter as innovation and timeto-market become key aspects of modern corporations' success in the marketplace. Few methods for inventory management exist that are capable of contending with product lifecycles measured in months rather than years. This situation is especially acute in the semiconductor industry, where a single generation o...

In recent years, researchers and industrial communities have been increasingly interested in Product Lifecycle Management (PLM); hence the product lifecycles have received considerable attention. The general features of the lifecycles are well known, however the special character of the equipment in research environment: the particularly long life, experimental character, complexity and interdi...

Traditional Digital Libraries require human editorial control over the lifecycles of digital objects contained therein. This imposes an inherent (human) overhead on the maintenance of these digital libraries, which becomes unwieldy once the number of important information units in the digital library becomes too large. A revised framework is needed for digital libraries that takes the onus off ...

This chapter describes a design methodology for business processes and workflows that focuses first on “business artifacts”, which represent key (real or conceptual) business entities, including both the business-relevant data about them and their macro-level lifecycles. Individual workflow services (a.k.a. tasks) are then incorporated, by specifying how they operate on the artifacts and fit in...