Process Patterns: Reusable Design Artifacts for Business Process Models

Graphical models for business processes are very large and cumbersome to build. Reusable process patterns can make this modeling task much easier. While using reusable components is a well-explored subject in software engineering, not much has been done in the context of business process modeling. In this paper, we will present an extension to Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), the standard notation for modeling business processes, in the form of reusable Process Patterns. We introduce a type system for these patterns and use it to define a valid embedding of a process pattern in a larger model. We also introduce the formal notations and show that business processes modeled using our extended notation can be translated to BPMN. We present a case study to demonstrate the applicability of the process pattern and further quantify its characteristics using a set of criteria. We also implement a modeling tool for users to model business process using process patterns.