Business process modeling based on entity life cycles

This paper presents an approach to business process modeling that aims to benefit from research on the artifact-oriented perspective and on case management. It draws the notion of entity life cycle from the former and the notion of hierarchical stage from the latter. The main purpose of the approach, which is called ELBA (Entity-Lifecyle Based Approach), is to leverage the notion of dataflow to coordinate the life cycles of the entities involved in a business process. For this reason, the approach takes advantage of a number of patterns, structural and functional, which are illustrated with the help of two examples, one related to the handling of papers submitted to conferences and the other concerning the many-to-many mapping between requisition orders and procurement ones in build-to-order processes.