A Projection-Stable Grammatical Model for the Distributed Execution of Administrative Processes with Emphasis on Actors' Views

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel decentralized, artifact-centric model for administrative process execution that emphasizes actors' views, ensuring confidentiality and partial perception while maintaining process consistency through projection algorithms.

Contribution

It presents a new projection-stable model for decentralized process execution with a focus on actors' perspectives and provides three algorithms to maintain process coherence.

Findings

The model ensures confidential execution by limiting actors' views.

Three projection algorithms maintain process consistency.

Mathematical proof confirms the stability of the algorithms.

Abstract

During the last two decades, the decentralized execution of business processes has been one of the main research topics in Business Process Management. Several models (languages) for processes' specification in order to facilitate their distributed execution, have been proposed. LSAWfP is among the most recent in this area: it helps to specify administrative processes with grammatical models indicating, in addition to their fundamental elements, the permissions (reading, writing and execution) of each actor in relation to each of their tasks. In this paper, we present a model for a completely decentralized and artifact-centric execution of administrative processes specified using LSAWfP. The presented model puts particular emphasis on actors' views: it then allows the confidential execution of certain tasks by ensuring that, each actor potentially has only a partial perception of the processes' global execution states. The model thus solves a very important problem in business process execution, which is often sidelined in existing approaches. To accomplish this, the model rely on three projection algorithms allowing to partially replicate the processes' global execution states at a given moment, to consistently update the obtained partial states and to deduce new coherent global states. The proposal of these three algorithms, the proof of underlying mathematical tools' stability and a proposal of their implementation, are this paper's main contributions.