Abstract
Business Process Model and Notation is the de facto standard for graphically modelling business processes. Since its first release in 2004, it evolved until reaching the actual 2.0 version, which presents more than 85 elements. Despite the notation being rich in graphical elements, initial studies show that only a subset of the BPMN elements is actually used. This paper aims at investigating whether the BPMN vocabulary adopted nowadays by model designers shows some particular trends. We collected 25,590 models from six online repositories to conduct such an investigation, and we analysed them. We report and discuss the obtained results providing insights on the correlations in the BPMN vocabulary and the resulting complexity of BPMN models.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
BPMN 2.0.2 is the latest version released in December 2013 https://www.omg.org/spec/BPMN/2.0.2 formally published by ISO as the 2013 edition standard: ISO/IEC 19510.
- 2.
More than 70 tools support BPMN (http://www.bpmn.org).
- 3.
The full collection name is “IBM Research GmbH, BIT process library, release 2009”.
- 4.
The full collection name is “Camunda BPMN for Research”.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
As it can be seen from Fig. 1 we associated an ID to each BPMN element so, for presentation purposes, the following analysis and diagrams use the IDs instead of the plain name of the elements.
References
Rolón, E., Cardoso, J., García, F., Ruiz, F., Piattini, M.: Analysis and validation of control-flow complexity measures with BPMN process models. In: Halpin, T., et al. (eds.) BPMDS/EMMSAD-2009. LNBIP, vol. 29, pp. 58–70. Springer, Heidelberg (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01862-6_6
Bork, D., Karagiannis, D., Pittl, B.: Systematic analysis and evaluation of visual conceptual modeling language notations. In: Research Challenges in Information Science, pp. 1–11. IEEE (2018)
Bork, D., Karagiannis, D., Pittl, B.: A survey of modeling language specification techniques. Inf. Syst, 87, 101425 (2020)
Compagnucci, I., Corradini, F., Fornari, F., Polini, A., Re, B., Tiezzi, F.: Modelling notations for IoT-aware business processes: a systematic literature review. In: Del Río Ortega, A., Leopold, H., Santoro, F.M. (eds.) BPM 2020. LNBIP, vol. 397, pp. 108–121. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66498-5_9
Corradini, F., Ferrari, A., Fornari, F., Gnesi, S., Polini, A., Re, B., Spagnolo, G.O.: A guidelines framework for understandable BPMN models. DKE 113, 129–154 (2018)
Corradini, F., Fornari, F., Polini, A., Re, B., Tiezzi, F.: A formal approach to modeling and verification of business process collaborations. SCP 166, 35–70 (2018)
Corradini, F., Fornari, F., Polini, A., Re, B., Tiezzi, F.: Reprository: a repository platform for sharing business process models. CEUR 2420, 149–153 (2019)
Dijkman, R.M., Dumas, M., Ouyang, C.: Semantics and analysis of business process models in BPMN. Inf. Softw. Technol. 50(12), 1281–1294 (2008)
Fahland, D., et al.: Instantaneous soundness checking of industrial business process models. In: Dayal, U., Eder, J., Koehler, J., Reijers, H.A. (eds.) BPM 2009. LNCS, vol. 5701, pp. 278–293. Springer, Heidelberg (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03848-8_19
Genon, N., Heymans, P., Amyot, D.: Analysing the cognitive effectiveness of the BPMN 2.0 visual notation. In: Malloy, B., Staab, S., van den Brand, M. (eds.) SLE 2010. LNCS, vol. 6563, pp. 377–396. Springer, Heidelberg (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19440-5_25
Haisjackl, C., Pinggera, J., Soffer, P., Zugal, S., Lim, S.Y., Weber, B.: Identifying quality issues in BPMN models: an exploratory study. In: Gaaloul, K., Schmidt, R., Nurcan, S., Guerreiro, S., Ma, Q. (eds.) CAISE 2015. LNBIP, vol. 214, pp. 217–230. Springer, Cham (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19237-6_14
Haisjackl, C., Soffer, P., Lim, S.Y., Weber, B.: How do humans inspect BPMN models: an exploratory study. Softw. Syst. Model. 17(2), 655–673 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-016-0563-8
Hamming, R.: Error detecting and error correcting codes. Bell Syst. Tech. J. 29, 147–160. Nokia Bell Labs (1950)
Heinze, T.S., Stefanko, V., Amme, W.: Mining BPMN processes on Github for tool validation and development. In: Nurcan, S., Reinhartz-Berger, I., Soffer, P., Zdravkovic, J. (eds.) BPMDS/EMMSAD-2020. LNBIP, vol. 387, pp. 193–208. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49418-6_13
Kobryn, C.: UML 2001: a standardization odyssey. Commun. ACM 42, 29–37 (1999)
Kossak, F., et al.: A Rigorous Semantics for BPMN 2.0 Process Diagrams. Springer, Cham (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09931-6
Mendling, J., Sánchez-González, L., García, F., Rosa, M.L.: Thresholds for error probability measures of business process models. J. Syst. Softw. 85(5), 1188–1197 (2012)
Muehlen, M., Recker, J.: How much language is enough? theoretical and practical use of the business process modeling notation. In: Bellahsène, Z., Léonard, M. (eds.) CAiSE 2008. LNCS, vol. 5074, pp. 465–479. Springer, Heidelberg (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-69534-9_35
OMG: Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), Version 2.0.2 (2013). https://www.omg.org/spec/BPMN/2.0.2
Siau, K., Erickson, J., Lee, L.: Theoretical vs. practical complexity: the case of UML. J. Database Manag. 16, 40–57 (2005)
Wohed, P., van der Aalst, W.M.P., Dumas, M., ter Hofstede, A.H.M., Russell, N.: On the suitability of BPMN for business process modelling. In: Dustdar, S., Fiadeiro, J.L., Sheth, A.P. (eds.) BPM 2006. LNCS, vol. 4102, pp. 161–176. Springer, Heidelberg (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/11841760_12
Wong, P.Y.H., Gibbons, J.: Formalisations and applications of BPMN. Sci. Comput. Program. 76(8), 633–650 (2011)
Zarour, K., Benmerzoug, D., Guermouche, N., Drira, K.: A systematic literature review on BPMN extensions. Bus. Process Manag. 26(6), 1473–1503 (2020)
Zipf, G.K.: On the dynamic structure of concert-programs. J. Abnorm. Psychol. 41(1), 25–36 (1946)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Compagnucci, I., Corradini, F., Fornari, F., Re, B. (2021). Trends on the Usage of BPMN 2.0 from Publicly Available Repositories. In: Buchmann, R.A., Polini, A., Johansson, B., Karagiannis, D. (eds) Perspectives in Business Informatics Research. BIR 2021. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 430. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87205-2_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87205-2_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-87204-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-87205-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)