Towards an EPC Standardization - A Literature Review on Exchange Formats for EPC Models

Event-driven process chains (EPCs) have been used to create business process models from the early 90s and are still used in research and practice today. However, up to today, there is still no accepted standard for the EPC modelling language, which caused several different EPC dialects to appear and disappear over the last decades. To contribute to the development of a future standard for the EPC modelling language, we have conducted a systematic literature review on exchange formats for EPC models. In the paper at hand, we describe seven different exchange and storage formats which we have found in literature and compare their properties and capabilities. We find that the EPC Markup Language (EPML) has the greatest capabilities so far, as it supports the greatest variety of different EPC dialects. With our discussion, we contribute to the development of an EPC standard in the future, by describing how EPML can be adapted as a standardized exchange language for EPC models, which is part of a future standard for the EPC language. 1 Get Things Going – Shedding Light on EPC Exchange Formats The event-driven process chain (EPC) has been one of the most dominant languages for business process modelling over the last decades and is well established in both research and practice (Knuppertz and Schnägelberger 2008; Fettke 2009; Houy et al. 2009). The maturity of EPCs manifests itself in numerous scientific publications covering a wide range of language aspects. In addition, the EPC has proven its relevance in practice by being implemented in most common business process modelling tools (Drawehn et al. 2014). However, in contrast to languages such as Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), whose popularity has been significantly boosted by the existence of a defined standard (Recker et al. 2006), no systematic standardization effort for the EPC language has been made yet. Consequently, the absence of a standard hampers EPC usage Volker Nissen, Dirk Stelzer, Steffen Straßburger und Daniel Fischer (Hrsg.): Multikonferenz Wirtschaftsinformatik (MKWI) 2016 Technische Universität Ilmenau 09. 11. März 2016 Ilmenau 2016 ISBN 978-3-86360-132-4 (Druckausgabe, Gesamtwerk) 1168 Dennis M. Riehle, Sven Jannaber, Arne Karhof, Patrick Delfmann, Oliver Thomas et al. and diffusion, especially due to difficulties in terms of interoperability, further development and overall acceptance (Ko et al. 2009; Fellmann et al. 2013). Nowadays, most business process modelling languages have been standardized by respective institutions, for example the Object Management Group (OMG) or the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) (ISO/IEC 15909-1 2004; OMG 2011). The publication of those standards ensures international adherence to specified language components such as syntax, notation or exchange format. Although there have been attempts to provide detailed specifications for certain aspects of the EPCs language (e.g. Nüttgens and Rump 2002; Mendling 2007), an official standardization process guided by a standardization development organization (SDO) has not been initiated to date. In addition, due to the widespread nature of EPCs and extensive previous research in the field, there exists a multitude of contributions ranging from various syntactical or semantical propositions to multiple language extensions (Rittgen 2000; Fettke et al. 2010), ultimately resulting in a mosaic-like EPC landscape. Naturally, this situation renders standard-making a difficult challenge. The paper at hand aims at addressing this issue by laying ground for a standardization of the EPC language. Since successful standardization endeavours rely heavily on agreement and consensus of a domain community (David and Greenstein 1990; Fomin et al. 2003), this paper tries to lift the fog of previous EPC research by proposing a state-of-the-art analysis on EPC exchange formats discussed in relevant literature. We believe that by focusing on exchange formats, valuable groundwork for further standardization efforts can be gained, since interfaces and thus the seamless exchange of data (e.g. models), is an essential driver for technical standardization (Fomin 2003; Mendling and Nüttgens 2006). Furthermore, exchange formats provide insight into other language components and underline what is of importance to software vendors and practitioners. A specific focus on literature has been chosen, since the foundation for successful EPC standard-making needs to closely consider both scientific and practical concerns. Hence, a research point of view has been applied in this paper, whereas a practical perspective is covered in greater detail in subsequent work. In order to investigate the state-of-the-art, a structured keyword-driven literature review is conducted. The results are classified according to predefined criteria and ultimately consolidated according to their underlying concept. By reviewing relevant literature, several formats to exchange EPCs have been identified. The major contribution of this paper is two-fold: On the one hand, an overview of scientific literature in the field of EPC exchange formats is provided. On the other hand, the identified formats are evaluated against their feasibility to serve as an EPC exchange format that can be adopted for EPC standardmaking. The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 introduces theoretical background on business process management with special focus on the EPC. In addition, a brief overview over related efforts to enhance EPC modelling and research conformable to ours further motivates the strived objects. Subsequently, the applied research methodology is carried out in Section 3. In Section 4 the results of the literature review are presented and synthesized, followed by a discussion of results and an outlook on further work. The paper concludes with a summary of the gained insights. MKWI 2016 – Modellierung betrieblicher Informationssysteme 1169 2 Theoretical Background and Related Work The first definition for EPCs emerged in the 1990s from a joint work of the Institute for Information Systems in Saarbrücken and SAP (Keller et al. 1992). The objective of the project has been to develop a definition of a business process language that would be able to document the SAP R/3 enterprise resource planning system (Melcher 2014). Due to its usability for reference modelling, the EPC evolved to a widely accepted and well-established business process modelling language in practice as well as in academic research (Mendling 2008). In order to obtain a comprehensive view on EPC exchange formats, it is necessary not just to consider the initial publication, but also to explore the manifold contributions in the field of EPCs. Alongside several standardization approaches (e.g. Nüttgens and Rump 2002; Mendling 2007), many extensions for the EPC language have been proposed. The basic elements initially established by Keller et al. (1992) mainly consist of events, functions and logical connectors. Events can either describe post-conditions or pre-conditions in the business process and are presented as a hexagon. Accordingly, a function represents an activity and is able to alter these conditions. Functions are portrayed as a rounded rectangle. Finally, logical connectors are used to join or split the control flow. This can be done with AND, OR and XOR connectors. As those connector types are also widely established in many other business process modelling languages, we renounce the explanation of their semantics. For an extensive explanation, the reader may refer to e.g. Keller et al. (1992). On the basis of these modelling concepts, many extensions have been developed and discussed in literature. The most widely known extension might be the eEPC (extended EPC), as it was also implemented in ARIS (Architecture of Integrated Information Systems) and is nowadays often synonymously used for EPC (Becker et al. 2009). Other contributions that have been considered in this research often extend the semantics of EPCs and mostly add new modelling possibilities. We identified configurable EPCs (C-EPC) which extend the basic EPC by two elements and try to capture commonalities between processes (La Rosa et al. 2011). Another extension is the Fuzzy EPCs by Thomas (Thomas 2009), who presents an approach to offset fuzziness that exists for some decisions in business process models. By doing so, the modelling possibilities have been enhanced (Thomas et al. 2002). Nüttgens and Zimmermann (1998) developed the object-oriented EPC (oEPC), which outsources functions and organizational units from the very control flow and rebind them on object classes. Events thereby are directly affiliated by the control flow with these object classes. A likely approach to enrich the basic EPC is semantically annotated EPCs (S-EPC). S-EPCs have been presented by the concept of an ontology and offer the possibility to annotate functions and other elements in an EPC. Due to that, explicit questions regarding the S-EPC model, like “which events triggers which functions”, can automatically be answered (Filipowska et al. 2009). Eventually, we identified Yet another EPC (yEPC) by Mendling et al. (2005a), an extension that enables standard EPCs the support of workflow patterns. Thereby the concepts of empty connectors, multiple instantiation and cancellation is introduced. By considering not only the basic EPC, the list of relevant exchange formats could be enhanced while doing research. Another reason for the need of a profound fundament is the lack of existing research in this field. Sarshar et al. (2005) provide an overview of EPC extensions, but neglect exchange formats in their consideration. A similar study has already been conducted by Barborka et al. (2006), who give a short review on EPC exchange formats by comparing Microsoft Visio VDX-files with AML-files of the ARIS Toolset and EPML files. However, they did not conduct a systematic literature