Process Coordination with Business Artifacts and Multiagent Technologies

This work is set in the context of data-centric approaches and is motivated by the observation that business artifacts are not devised as natural means of coordination, despite the fact that they have this potential. Instead of using orchestration and choreography languages, we propose to enrich business artifacts with a normative layer that defines the coordination, basing our approach on social commitments. The straightforward advantage is an increased reusability of both processes and business artifacts, thanks to a clear decoupling between the coordination logic and the business logic. We show how social commitments can be leveraged for modularizing the design of distributed tasks and discuss the advantages of the approach from a software engineering perspective.