Multilevel Business Artifacts

The representation of many real-world scenarios in conceptual models benefits from the use of multilevel abstraction hierarchies. Product models, for example, are typically grouped into product categories which, in turn, constitute the company’s range of products. Multilevel abstraction hierarchies often reflect the organizational structure of a company and the different information needs of the various departments. Current modeling techniques, however, lack extensive support for the representation of multilevel abstraction hierarchies in business process models. The explicit consideration of multilevel abstraction hierarchies in business process models might improve the alignment of processes across different organizational entities. In this paper, we introduce the concept of the multilevel business artifact (MBA) for representing multilevel abstraction hierarchies of both data and process models. An MBA encapsulates in a single object the data and process models of various levels, thereby expanding consequently the idea of business artifacts to the realm of multilevel abstraction hierarchies.