Computing the cost of BPMN diagrams

In this report we propose some extensions of the business process modeling notation (BPMN) to be able to evaluate the overall cost of business process diagrams. The BPMN is very expressive, and a general treatment of this problem is very complex. Therefore, it seems reasonable to define classes of business process diagrams capturing real processes and to develop efficient analysis methods for these classes. In the paper we define some relevant subsets of the BPMN, extend them with the concept of cost, and provide computational models for each class, in most cases reducing them to existing problems for which efficient solutions already exist. . Department of Computer Science, University of Bologna, Via Mura A.Zamboni 7, 40127 Bologna, Italy.