Green business process patterns

To ensure their competitive advantage an increasing number of organizations adopt business process management for design, automation, and analysis of their business processes. In order to reduce cost, improve quality, save time, and increase flexibility, techniques for business process improvement and re-engineering are applied. Improving the environmental impact of a business process is a new challenge organizations are faced with. However, current approaches and techniques for business process optimization do not cover the ecological dimension explicitly. In this paper, we propose patterns which describe good solutions for green business process design to address this gap from a business perspective. The patterns are described independently from concrete business process modeling languages and execution environments in order to provide a broad applicability of the patterns within different scenarios. In addition to the patterns, we discuss the general usability of the patterns based on different aspects relevant to an organization.