Measuring and Improving the Quality of BPMN Process Models

The international standard Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is more and more used for visualization and documentation purposes. Though the current version 2.0 of BPMN is potentially suitable for direct execution on process engines the main domain of BPMN is still the modeling of human-centric processes. And these processes are mainly not intended to be directly executed.

Due to various reasons the process model quality is often not sufficient:

  • The standard document is lengthy, partly inconsistent and vague.
  • Model exchange between different tools is often not possible.
  • Depending on the domains and use cases the standard notation is not always appropriate.

In our research project we elaborate on proposals for measuring and improving the quality of human-centric process models on different layers of abstraction. In order to improve the interoperability between modeling tools we perform an extensive analysis of the standard document to extract all rules and constraints for correct BPMN process models. Modeling tools and model instances must comply with those constraints in order to be BPMN compliant and to enable interoperability. Moreover, depending on an analysis of existing quality metrics BPMN-specific metrics for measuring the model quality of human-centric process models will be developed. Furthermore another aspect is the development of tools and methods to improve the quality of concrete BPMN process models in various use cases.


Participants:

Matthias Geiger
Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Guido Wirtz