Actsinstances

Actsinstances is a term used in information systems to denote the concrete execution occurrences of a defined act within a process or workflow. It is distinct from an abstract act or task; an actsinstance represents a specific instantiation in time and space within a process run, recording its execution trace for auditing and analysis.

In a typical data model, an actsinstance includes fields such as id, act_id, process_instance_id, actor_id, start_time, end_time, status, input_data, output_data, and audit fields. It may also include predecessor or sequence links, version, and lineage to support provenance. Actsinstances thereby provide a granular record of when and by whom an act was executed, along with the data it consumed and produced.

Lifecycle: created when the act starts, updated as it progresses through states (scheduled, running, completed, failed, aborted), and persisted with an end_time on completion. Actsinstances enable replay and debugging by reconstructing the exact sequence of acts for a given process instance and by providing a trace suitable for auditing and compliance.

Applications: used in business process management, BPMN execution traces, event-sourced architectures, and actor-based systems to capture execution provenance and support reporting and compliance. They help distinguish multiple executions of the same act across different process instances or parallel threads, and they support performance analysis and anomaly detection.

Relationship: actsinstances complement acts (the specification) and process_instance records. They differ from event logs by being more tightly structured around act-level granularity. They are often stored in relational or document stores and can be integrated with audit trails and provenance systems. See also act, process instance, provenance, event log, workflow.