Section: New Results

Decentralized Enforcement of Artifact Lifecycles

Participants : Sylvain Hallé [The University of Québec at Chicoutimi, Canada] , Raphaël Khoury [The University of Québec at Chicoutimi, Canada] , Antoine El-Hokayem, Yliès Falcone.

Artifact-centric workflows describe possible executions of a business process through constraints expressed from the point of view of the documents exchanged between principals. A sequence of manipulations is deemed valid as long as every document in the workflow follows its prescribed lifecycle at all steps of the process. So far, establishing that a given workflow complies with artifact lifecycles has mostly been done through static verification, or by assuming a centralized access to all artifacts where these constraints can be monitored and enforced. We propose an alternate method of enforcing document lifecycles that requires neither static verification nor single-point access. Rather, the document itself is designed to carry fragments of its history, protected from tampering using hashing and public-key encryption. Any principal involved in the process can verify at any time that a document's history complies with a given lifecycle. Moreover, the proposed system also enforces access permissions: not all actions are visible to all principals, and one can only modify and verify what one is allowed to observe.

This work was presented at EDOC 2016 [17].