On Handling Business Process Anomalies through Artifact-based Modeling

Control flow-based process modeling notations, like BPMN, are good at dening the normal execution flow and the management of foreseen exceptions. When unforeseen situations occur, one cannot detect if the execution is still acceptable with respect to the process definition. In contrast, artifact-centric process modeling notations, like the Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM), are better suited for this kind of scenarios: they define a process in terms of acceptable states and do not enforce any specific execution flow. This improves flexibility, but hampers the clarity of the defined models. The goal of this paper is to show how an extension of GSM, i.e., E-GSM, can be used to detect deviations from the execution path as modeled in BPMN, while keeping the process execution alive.