52 Int. J. Business Process Integration and Management, Vol. 6, No.

1, 2012

A survey on reuse in the business process

management domain

Marcelo Fantinato*
University of São Paulo,
Rua Arlindo Béttio, 1000,
03828-000, São Paulo, SP, Brazil
E-mail: m.fantinato@usp.br
*Corresponding author

Maria Beatriz Felgar de Toledo

State University of Campinas,
Av. Albert Einstein, 1251,
13083-970, Campinas, SP, Brazil
E-mail: beatriz@ic.unicamp.br

Lucinéia Heloisa Thom

Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul,
P.O. Box 15064, 91501-970, Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil
E-mail: lucineia@inf.ufrgs.br

Itana Maria de Souza Gimenes

State University of Maringá,
Av. Colombo, 5790, 87020-900,
Maringá, PR, Brazil
E-mail: itana@din.uem.br

Roberto dos Santos Rocha

University of São Paulo,
Rua Arlindo Béttio, 1000,
03828-000, São Paulo, SP, Brazil
E-mail: rsrocha@usp.br

Diego Zuquim Guimarães Garcia

Federal University of Ouro Preto,
Rua 36, 115, 35931-008,
Joao Monlevade, MG, Brazil
E-mail: diego.garcia@ufop.br

Abstract: Business process management (BPM) is an important technological support to

improve organisation competitiveness. BPM can benefit from reuse approaches and techniques at
several stages of the business process life cycle in order to increase dynamism, flexibility and
competitiveness. Existing reuse techniques from areas such as software engineering can be
extended to this emerging domain. This paper presents the results of a literature review of reuse
in the BPM domain. It aims to provide an overview and an overall discussion of most relevant
research projects that have been developed applying reuse in BPM.

Keywords: survey; reuse; business process management; BPM.

Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Fantinato, M., Toledo, M.B.F.d.,
Thom, L.H., Gimenes, I.M.d.S., Rocha, R.d.S. and Garcia, D.Z.G. (2012) ‘A survey on reuse in
the business process management domain’, Int. J. Business Process Integration and
Management, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp.52–76.

Copyright © 2012 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

 A survey on reuse in the business process management domain 53

Biographical notes: Marcelo Fantinato is an Assistant Professor in the School of Arts, Sciences
and Humanities, University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil. He received his PhD in Computer
Science in 2007 and Master of Engineering in 2002 at the University of Campinas (Unicamp),
Brazil. He has worked in the industry as a Software Testing Specialist at the CPqD Foundation in
Campinas, Brazil in 2001 to 2006 and as a specialist in research and development at Motorola in
Jaguariúna, Brazil in 2006 to 2008. His main research interests are business process management,
service-oriented computing, software product line and software testing.

Maria Beatriz Felgar de Toledo is an Associate Professor in the Institute of Computing, State
University of Campinas (Unicamp), Brazil. She received her MSc in Computer Science from
Unicamp and PhD degree from Lancaster University, UK in 1992. She is a member of the
SOCOLNET and has organised Brazilian workshops on BPM. Her main research interests are
advanced transaction models, business process management systems, knowledge base systems
for clinical research and cultural heritage.

Lucinéia Heloisa Thom is a Scientist at the Institute of Informatics at the Federal University of
Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil. She was a Visiting Scientist at the University of Ulm in
2007 to 2009. She received her Bachelor’s in Computer Science from the University of Santa
Cruz do Sul, Brazil in 1999; Master’s in Computer Science from UFRGS in 2002; and PhD in
Computer Science from UFRGS in 2006. She developed part of her thesis research at the
University of Stuttgart in 2004 to 2005. Her research interests are in the area of workflow
systems with a special focus on meta-models, business process modelling, workflow patterns and
IT support for healthcare information systems.

Itana Maria de Souza Gimenes is a Professor of Software Engineering at State University of

Maringá, Paraná, Brazil. She is a Postdoctoral Research at the MCT, OU, UK in 2011, and at the
School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Canada in 2005. She received her PhD in
Computer Science at the University of York, Department of Computer Science, UK in 1992. She
is the President of the Brazilian Computer Society Committee of Software Engineering in 2007 to
2008 and 1998 to 1999 (CEES-SBC). She has lead several research projects, including
international cooperation with the European community. Her current research interests include:
software architecture, software PL, component-based development, workflow management
systems and BPM.

Roberto dos Santos Rocha is Bachelor in Business Administration; Specialist in Management

Information Systems at the Federal University of Lavras (UFLA), Brazil in 2009; and has an
incomplete Bachelor in Computer Science (UESB, 2006 to 2010). He is currently a Master
student of the Graduate Programme in Information Systems at the University of São Paulo
(USP). He develops research activities in the area of software engineering, with a special focus
on: software product line, business process management, service-oriented computing and
software reuse.

Diego Zuquim Guimarães Garcia is an Assistant Professor of Software Engineering at the

Federal University of Ouro Preto, Brazil. He received his MSc in Computer Science from the
State University of Campinas (Unicamp), Brazil in 2007 and PhD in Computing from Unicamp
and the University of Western Ontario, Canada in 2011. His main research interests are business
process management and service-oriented computing.

1 Introduction
Current complexity inherent in the corporative world
demands agility and innovation from the IT infrastructure so
that technical solutions can improve business. Business
process management (BPM) is an important technological
support to improve organisation competitiveness. BPM can
benefit from reuse approaches and techniques at several
stages of business process life cycle in order to increase
dynamism, flexibility and time to market.
The BPM domain involves several activities which
range from:
1 modelling and simulating the business process
2 implementing and instantiating business process models
3 deploying business process within specific
environments and organisations
4 supporting business process execution through
administration
5 monitoring and auditing process execution
6 analysing and optimising business process in execution.
Recently, the service-oriented computing (SOC) paradigm
brought about new resources that can be used to improve
BPM interchange of services within the inter-organisational
scope.
Different existing reuse approaches and techniques can
be extended to be applied to this emerging domain. These
54 M. Fantinato et al.
techniques are usually adapted from other application areas,
such as software engineering, such as software product line
(PL) or software product families; variability descriptors;
design patterns; feature modelling; aspect-orientation; and,
component-based development. In addition, completely new
approaches and techniques can be proposed specifically to
the BPM domain.
Essentially, business processes can be compared to
software, what explains why so many reuse approaches
from software engineering can be adapted or extended for
BPM. Although BPM and software process life cycles are
similar, they have some differences, which should be taken
into account when techniques are shared: for example, BPM
life cycle is quite shorter, generally faster and more dynamic
than the software process life cycle. Commonly, a given
business process model evolves from a previous version far
more often than a given software at the same period.
Considering that several research projects have already
been developed taking advantage of reuse approaches in the
BPM domain, we carried out a literature review to identify
relevant works, describe them and perform an overall
discussion about them. The main goal of this paper is to
present projects found in main indexed vehicles in a survey
format to support research in this area.
This paper is organised as follows: Section 2 presents an
overview of the methodology carried out to compose this
survey; Section 3 presents the overall results of this survey;
Section 4 to Section 8 presents summaries of the works
identified, grouped into five main themes; Section 9
presents an overall discussion of presented papers in this
survey; and finally, Section 10 concludes this paper.
2 Methodology
The literature review undertaken presented in this paper was
based on the procedures described by Kitchenham (2007),
in which systematic reviews and systematic mappings are
described. These procedures are both bibliographic
literature reviews used to identify, assess and interpret
available research works that are relevant to a particular
research area or issue. These studies must be replicable,
scientific and transparent.
Not all the steps of a systematic literature review as
proposed by Kitchenham (2007) were performed to
compose our survey, since it was not our objective to create
a complete basis for a specific ongoing research work
whose results would depend of this survey. Our objective
was to present an overall analysis of this area, which could
help researchers also interested in this subject. However, our
literature review was as systematic as possible, following
the procedures described by Kitchenham (2007).
The literature review process consists of the next steps:
1 defining the review scope through research questions
2 searching in databases, using keywords, the candidate
papers to be used in answering the research questions
3 producing the list of relevant papers, applying a filter
with inclusion and exclusion criteria (EC) into the
initial list of candidate papers
4 defining a classification mechanism so that the relevant
papers can be grouped based on recurrent keywords
5 assessing papers content so that they can finally be
classified and described as the result of the review.
Results of the first four steps are presented in the next
section whereas results of the last step are presented in
Sections 4 to 8.
3 Review scope and selected papers
An overview of the results to obtain this papers selected for
this survey according to the methodology discussed in
Section 2 is presented below.
3.1 Research questions
As a result of the first step, three research questions were
defined:
Q1 Which are the main reuse techniques present in the
works related to the BPM domain?
Q2 Are works related to reuse in the BPM domain recent or
already mature research project works?
Q3 Which are the main advantages/benefits and
drawbacks/limitations of the selected works?
3.2 Selection of the complete list of papers
Table 1 presents the ‘search string’ used to seek for papers
related to this literature review. The keywords in the search
string were derived from the research question Q1.
Table 1 Search string
(reus*) AND (BPM OR ‘business process management’)
This search aims to look for works that were explicitly
related to the application of reuse techniques in the BPM
domain. Works implicitly related to this area were not
considered for this literature review taking into account the
focused objective of this survey. For example, papers
describing some reuse techniques without mentioning that it
was a ‘reuse’ technique or that it was being applied in some
phase of the BPM life cycle without explicitly mentioning
the BPM domain were not selected for this survey.
Reuse techniques were searched in a broad way, which
is represented in the ‘search string’ by the expression
‘reus*’ meaning that different terms such as ‘reuse’,
‘reusable’, ‘reusability’ and ‘reusing’ should be considered.
This ‘search string’ was submitted to the search
mechanism of the Scopus database (http://www.scopus.com),
which includes registers of the main conferences and
journals published by digital libraries such as Springer,
ACM, IEEE and several other important indexed vehicles.
 A survey on reuse in the business process management domain 55

The string was applied not only to the ‘title’ field, but Figure 1 Distribution of papers per year, per vehicle type
also to the ‘abstract’ and ‘keywords’ fields to maximise (see online version for colours)
the number of papers to be found. A quick analysis
showed that the use of the database WebOfScience
(http://apps.isiknowledge.com/) would be redundant. With
the result, after reading the titles and keywords, papers
clearly irrelevant to the research questions were excluded.
There was no restriction on the publication period. A
total of 111 papers were identified as candidate papers to be
used in answering the research questions.

3.3 Selection of the relevant papers 3.4 Classification of the relevant papers
In order to select only the list of papers really appropriate to For the classification mechanism, 12 keywords related
this survey, the following inclusion and EC were applied: somehow to reuse techniques were identified as the most
• Inclusion criteria (IC): IC were used to guarantee that recurrent in the relevant papers. These keywords as well as
the keywords, in the ‘search string’, found in this the results of the classification carried out for these papers
papers are not present in this paper only by chance, but are presented in Table 2.
that this paper is really related to the focus of this After this first classification, and taking into account the
survey. Such evaluation is necessary since in some classification presented in Table 2, a deeper analysis was
cases a paper can have been found in the search performed and, as a result, all the 52 files were grouped into
because the keyword is present for example only once five simple and refined clusters as presented in Table 3. To
but in another context. The criteria are the following: define this final classification mechanism for papers, the
objective was to identify the main characteristic of the work
IC-1 Paper whose content really treats some reuse being presented in this paper, even when it presents more
technique was kept. than one property according to Table 2. Moreover, some
IC-2 Paper whose content is really related to the keywords presented in Table 2 that had meanings very close
BPM domain was kept. to each other were grouped into a single group. Applying
such rules, groups that are more cohesive were produced in
IC-3 Paper in which the reuse technique and the this final classification, which can better represent this paper
BPM domain are really related to each other groups being evaluated. As a collateral effect of this final
was kept. classification, four papers were classified into the ‘other’
category since they do not relate directly to any other.
• EC: the following EC were used to guarantee that the
Figure 2 presents a summary of the classification results
found papers are really appropriate for the context of
considering this final classification mechanism (aligned to
this survey.
results presented in Table 3).
EC-1 Registers related to ‘introductions to
proceedings’, ‘special issue editorials’, ‘calls for Figure 2 Distribution of papers per final category (see online
version for colours)
papers’ or ‘technical reports’ were not kept.
Only papers presenting the results of some
research work which was published in some
journal or conference proceedings were kept.
EC-2 Papers whose electronic version could not be
found in the internet were not kept.
The IC and the EC were applied based on an initial paper
reading, including abstract, introduction and conclusion. As
the final result, 52 relevant papers were selected. The
distribution of these 52 papers through the years in which
they were published, and also taking into account the type
of publication (workshop, conference or journal), is
presented in Figure 1.
As already stated, only the main characteristic of each paper
Considering the vehicle in which these papers were
was considered to classify them, what explains that the total
published, it was observed that they were very spread in
number of papers is 52 when summing up the five
several and different workshops, conferences and journals.
categories. Despite this, it is possible that some paper
In total, there are 44 different vehicles found in this survey,
classified into a given category also presents some features
and only one workshop, one journal and four conferences
related to other categories, but in a smaller importance
appears two or three times in the results.
56 M. Fantinato et al.

degree. For example, a paper classified in the ‘pattern’
category can also present ‘service-oriented architecture’
(SOA) properties, although their ‘pattern’ properties were
considered most important for its classification.
In the following five sections, these 52 relevant papers
are presented. Each one of the five groups of Table 3 or
Figure 2 is presented in a specific section. For each paper,
its overview as well as benefits and limitations are
presented.

Table 2 Classification mechanism considering reuse techniques and classified papers

Paper SOA Knowledge Framework Architecture Pattern Ontology Variants Reasoning PL MDD Mining Features
Kritikos and x x x
Kubicki
(2011)
Brahe and x x x x x
Bordbar
(2009)
Zhao et al. x x x
(2009)
Rodrigues x x
et al. (2006)
Mou et al. x x x
(2004)
Gimenes x x x x x
et al. (2008)
Zhang et al. x x x
(2012)
Zhang et al. x x x
(2010)
Lee et al. x x
(2008)
Fang et al. x x
(2009)
Thom et al. x x x
(2008)
Stoitsev et al. x x x x x
(2008a)
Kang and x x x x
Baik (2010)
Schumm x x
et al. (2010)
Weber et al. x x x
(2006)
Shepherdson x x x x
et al. (2008)
Fang Fang x x
and Chien
Sing (2009)
Tomaz et al. x
(2009)
Deokar and x x x x
El-Gayar
(2010)
Gîrbea et al. x
(2010)
Stoitsev et al.
(2008b)
Gonçalves x x x x x x
et al. (2011)
Notes: SOA – service-oriented architecture; PL – product line; MDD – model driven development
 A survey on reuse in the business process management domain 57

Table 2 Classification mechanism considering reuse techniques and classified papers (continued)

Paper SOA Knowledge Framework Architecture Pattern Ontology Variants Reasoning PL MDD Mining Features
Liu et al. x x x
(2011)
Meng et al. x
(2008)
Stoitsev et al. x x
(2008c)
Holschke et al. x x
(2009)
Yao et al. x x x
(2006)
Chakravarty x x x x
and Singh
(2008)
Wegener and x x x x
Rüping
(2011a)
Buco et al.
(2011)
Al-Zoubi and x x x x
Wainer (2010)
Bonillo et al. x x x x x
(2008)
Asadi et al. x x x x x x x
(2009)
Lu et al. x x x x x
(2009)
Wegener and x x x x
Rüping
(2011b)
Karastoyanova x x x
(2010)
Lu and Sadiq x x x
(2007)
Bhatt et al. x x x x
(2007)
Pascalau et al. x x x
(2011)
Demirkan and x x x x
Goul (2007)
Xiong et al. x
(2011)
Aiello et al. x x x x
(2010)
Hu et al. x x
(2011)
Mou et al. x x x x
(2005)
Bosh et al. x x
(2007)
Xu et al. x x
(2011)
Weidmann x
et al. (2011)
Notes: SOA – service-oriented architecture; PL – product line; MDD – model driven development
58 M. Fantinato et al.

Table 2 Classification mechanism considering reuse techniques and classified papers (continued)

Paper SOA Knowledge Framework Architecture Pattern Ontology Variants Reasoning PL MDD Mining Features
Marjanovic x
(2005)
Namiri and x x x x
Stojanovic
(2007)
Braghetto x x x
et al. (2007)
Mulik et al. x
(2008)
Ou and Peng x x x x x x
(2006)
Notes: SOA – service-oriented architecture; PL – product line; MDD – model driven development

Table 3 Final classification for the relevant papers

Paper SOA Pattern Ontology/reasoning Variants/PL Other

Kritikos and Kubicki (2011) x
Brahe and Bordbar (2009) x
Zhao et al. (2009) x
Rodrigues et al. (2006) x
Mou et al. (2004) x
Gimenes et al. (2008) x
Zhang et al. (2012) x
Zhang et al. (2010) x
Lee et al. (2008) x
Fang et al. (2009) x
Thom et al. (2008) x
Stoitsev et al. (2008a) x
Kang and Baik (2010) x
Schumm et al. (2010) x
Weber et al. (2006) x
Shepherdson et al. (2008) x
Fang Fang and Chien Sing (2009) x
Tomaz et al. (2009) x
Deokar and El-Gayar (2010) x
Gîrbea et al. (2010) x
Stoitsev et al. (2008b) x
Gonçalves et al. (2011) x
Liu et al. (2011) x
Meng et al. (2008) x
Stoitsev et al. (2008c) x
Holschke et al. (2009) x
Yao et al. (2006) x
Chakravarty and Singh (2008) x
Wegener and Rüping (2011a) x
Buco et al. (2011) x
Al-Zoubi and Wainer (2010) x
Bonillo et al. (2008) x
Asadi et al. (2009) x
 A survey on reuse in the business process management domain 59

Table 3 Final classification for the relevant papers (continued)

Paper SOA Pattern Ontology/reasoning Variants/PL Other

Lu et al. (2009) x
Wegener and Rüping (2011b) x
Karastoyanova (2010) x
Lu and Sadiq (2007) x
Bhatt et al. (2007) x
Pascalau et al. (2011) x
Demirkan and Goul (2007) x
Xiong et al. (2011) x
Aiello et al. (2010) x
Hu et al. (2011) x
Mou et al. (2005) x
Bosh et al. (2007) x
Xu et al. (2011) x
Weidmann et al. (2011) x
Marjanovic (2005) x
Namiri and Stojanovic (2007) x
Braghetto et al. (2007) x
Mulik et al. (2008) x
Ou and Peng (2006) x

4 Group 1: SOA-related papers 4.2 A SOA-BPM-based architecture for intelligent

This section presents the group of papers whose main
characteristic related to reuse is the application of
SOA in some extension. SOA, as an evolution of the
object-orientation and component-based development, is
one of the main approaches being used to promote reuse in
the BPM reuse. In general, these works are related to many
fields of application, as can be seen in descriptions as
follows.
4.1 A SOA-based power quality management
platform (Zhang et al., 2012)
In this work, SOA is used as a basis for proposing a power
quality management platform, aiming at Zhang et al. (2012):
reusing the existing power quality systems; sharing the
information; and, supporting the changing of management
business process in power quality. The SOA-framework is
designed to reuse the functions of existing system to
implement an integrative platform that can meet general
power quality management business requirements using
web services. From its five layers, one of them is
specifically targeted to manage business processes
composed by the services treated in the lower layers. Using
the BPM as final target, this paper illustrates a BPM that
implements a business process of disturbance load
evaluation. The BPM is responsible for managing the
business process to achieve the analysis and control of
power quality problems.
power dispatching system (Zhang et al., 2010)
This work is applied into the power systems domain, in
which a series of difficulties in interoperations exists
hampering the development of power dispatching systems,
which demands a high reuse degree. As a solution proposed
by this paper, a BPM approach, based on SOA paradigm, is
presented (Zhang et al., 2010). The SOA-BPM-based
architecture for intelligent power dispatching system is
designed to provide flexibility and scalability to the existing
power dispatching systems. BPM coordinates reusable web
services to implement business processes while takes
business process optimisation as its core goal. It provides an
easy means to plug in new modules and to derive new
functionalities through system interactions, For example,
with the SOA architecture, the system can support
intelligent dispatching through reuse the underlying
modules and, on top of that, BPM accelerate the process of
providing new business demands. The architecture is
divided into six layers: enterprise resource layer,
SOA-based business particles support layer, BPM-based
business logic integration layer, unified user interface layer,
general technical support layer and security layer.
4.3 Application component development of OSGi and
JBPM-based RFID middleware (Fang et al.,
2009)
This paper presents a solution in which Java business
process management (JBPM) is combined with open
60 M. Fantinato et al.
service gateway initiative (OSGi) to build radio
frequency identification (RFID) application components
(Fang et al., 2009). JBPM is a lightweight J2EE-based
workflow management system, which combines the
application of state automaton, UML2.0 activity diagram
and Petri net algorithm. OSGi is a component-oriented,
with service-oriented characteristics, loosely coupled
software-programming model that supports the management
of the component life cycle and communication. Built by
combining JBPM and OSGi, the RFID application
components infrastructure, can achieve the reuse of
application components and business processes in a
convenient way. OSGi allows that reusable components
support plug-and-play and can be managed dynamically. In
addition, with the help of JBPM workflow, the application
components support process management and the whole
process is reusable. Through the combination of OSGi and
JBPM, both component-based software development
technology and service-oriented have been used, and finally
reached the goal of workflow reuse and component reuse in
the RFID application systems, which is a good attempt to
greatly reduce the development difficulty of the RFID
middleware and RFID middleware-based enterprise-class
application systems, improve the flexibility of RFID
applications, and reduce the difficulties of subsequent
expansion and maintenance.
4.4 Collaborative learning using SOA: a framework
design (Fang Fang and Chien Sing, 2009)
This work proposes, based the results of a related works, a
SOA approach to enhance the interoperability, flexibility
and reusability of e-learning content in a collaborative
environment. The preliminary review studied some works
on SOA, distributed infrastructure, BPM and highlights the
need to integrate SOA technologies for meaningful and
interactive collaborative learning processes. The research
questions for study were:
1 How can SOA (conceptually and technically) be
designed to allow flexible interaction between different
components in LMSs in enhancing collaborative
learning environments?
2 How can we utilise BPM to manage learning
processes?
As a result of the review, it was concluded that many
of the collaborative learning systems are mainly based on
client-server architectures, which give rise to the problems
of poor flexibility, scalability and interoperability.
Collaborative learning using SOA, which serves as a
novel approach in the e-learning domain, can help in
distributing the learning content more efficiently and
promotes reusability, but most research has not addressed
the implementation aspects. They have introduced
a SOA-solution, addressing the implementation details for
the service design aspects, incorporating web-service,
BPM and e-learning. According to the authors, the
framework using the web service approach can increase the
efficiency and effectiveness of collaborative learning in
terms of reusability, interoperability, accessibility and
modularisation.
4.5 Design, implementation and monitoring of a
screw order handling process using BPM tools
(Gîrbea et al., 2010)
This paper describes a new approach for the modelling of an
enterprise application (Gîrbea et al., 2010). This approach
supposes a clear division of the application into three
components: web front-end, business process and database.
The application described in this paper implements the
concepts of BPM and SOA. The goal is to create a business
process which is extremely flexible, which can react fast to
the changing business needs and which as a result, can be
improved easily at any time. This paper particularly
describes the development and testing of the business
process. According to the authors, this new technique
assures a perfect combination between the automated and
the human tasks. The order placed by a client is processed
by the business process and as a result the raw materials
used, the processing mode, the working timetable for the
treatment, the galvanisation is determined. Finally, the client
receives a notification including the acceptance/refusal of
the order and the calculated delivery date for an accepted
order. Reusability of the code is pointed out as one of the
benefits of this approach besides flexibility for the
application and automated monitoring of the activities. As a
result, the company can be able to react faster to market
changes and the costs of the changes are minimum ones.
4.6 Enabling end-user driven business process
composition through programming by example
in a collaborative task management system
(Stoitsev et al., 2008b)/from personal task
management to end-user driven business
process modelling (Stoitsev et al., 2008c)
Stoitsev et al. (2008b) present an integrated approach for
enabling informed participation of end users in business
process composition by introducing several gentle slopes of
complexity and providing benefit on personal task
management as motivation to overcome each one of them.
The approach is implemented and validated through a
prototype; named collaborative task manager (CTM)
implemented using web services. Usage of CTM tasks is
motivated through transparency in collaborative processes,
exceeding the capabilities of common e-mail and to-do lists.
The extraction and adaptation of TPs is motivated through
the ability to exchange and reuse previous experience. The
transformation of ad hoc processes to formal workflows
benefits from multiple representations, fostering tailoring as
collaboration between business users, end-user tailors and
developers. Three major design goals were defined for
enabling end-user driven business process composition:
gentle slope of complexity; seeding, evolutionary growth
and reseeding; and, support tailoring as collaboration.
 A survey on reuse in the business process management domain
Continuing their work, Stoitsev et al. (2008c) present an
integrated approach for end-user driven business process
modelling which uses web service-based activity tracking to
generate weakly structured process models by capturing
data on personal task management. These models can be
adapted and reused for ad hoc process support or
exported to formal workflows by delivering the business
knowledge to process designers and software developers.
Interconnection of ad hoc and formal workflows results in
enhanced process flexibility and allows complementation of
formal workflows through deviations at runtime. The
approach is validated through the CTM prototype.
4.7 Extension BPML for sub-process (Meng et al.,
2008)
Taking into account that to design large and complex
business processes requires a language that supports
modularisation and reuse in a portable manner, Meng et al.
(2008) propose an extension to business process modelling
language (BPML) language that allows for the definition of
sub-processes that can be reused by the BPML process. The
BPML is an XML-based, developed by the business process
management initiative (BPMI) as a means of modelling
business processes based on web services described through
WSDL language. BPML is a meta-language for the
modelling of business processes, just as XML is a
meta-language for the modelling of business data. They
describe two different kinds of sub-processes – independent
and embedding sub-processes – and introduce a call activity
and a mechanism to be used to call for the sub-process. The
sub-process is a reusable process. It is usually simple and
can complete some special tasks independently. The
proposed type of sub-process has the same context data and
the status with the main process. Sub-processes do not only
exchanges of messages with the main process but also
communicate with the other processes. Sub-processes can
run a long time until some other main process to call for it.
4.8 On scientific experiments and flexible service
compositions (Karastoyanova, 2010)
In this work, Karastoyanova (2010) gives an overview of
open issues in the support for scientific experiments and
possible approaches to addressing them in a SOA-based
environment. It is identified the need for enhancing the
BPM practices, technologies and techniques in order to
render them applicable in the area of scientific
experimenting. Moreover, it is stressed on the even greater
importance of workflow flexibility and also showed why
flexibility techniques are crucial when it is about improving
the IT support for scientists. Although reuse is not the main
objective of this paper, some specific discussions raised by
the author also treats of this subject, usually related to the
flexibility subject. Reuse aspects are specifically discussed
in terms of ‘modelling’ and ‘executing’ scientific
experiments based on workflows and BPM. Moreover, in
terms of approaches to flexibility of service compositions,
reuse is discussed when the BPEL light is discussed.
61
4.9 Realisation of business process automation
based on web services and WS-BPEL (Xiong
et al., 2011)
Based on the reusability of web services and the
capability of process design management of WS-BPEL,
Xiong et al. (2011) describe how to design and implement
general-purpose business process automation. As part of
their work, on the instance of commercial business model,
business process is analysed and planned; reusable web
services modules are designed and an illustrative example of
business process automation model is designed based on
these service modules. Moreover, the deployment and
operation of instance model are carried out with active
BPEL tool as the engine. According to the authors, test and
operation results show that, through the reuse of web
services and the application of WS-BPEL language, the
implementation of the combination of web services and the
creation of the business process with more functions are
convenient, so as to realise the process automation.
4.10 Research of technologies on discreet factory
construction general contract project
management (Hu et al., 2011)
This paper is contextualised in the factory construction
domain in which general contracts are project managements
with multi-side participation. In such context, each
participant may come from different areas, and their
management information systems (ISs) are independent
from each other. Therefore, it is necessary to integrate
heterogeneous systems and optimise business processes in
different systems to use resources from different systems
and reduce information construct cost. The combination of
SOA and BPM provides a feasible solution for general
contract with multi-side participation, in which SOA
integrates heterogeneous systems by its service mechanism
and BPM achieve the reusing of service opened by SOA to
relocate resource from different systems and take
advantages of business process centred management. This
combination brings about several advantages for
management:
1 reducing IT cost
2 facilitating teamwork
3 normalising business processes
4 allowing business process automation
5 improving quality
6 optimising business processes.
In this work, SOA is applied to integrate resources
from different systems, which is a loosely coupled and
cross-platform architecture in order to solve problems
caused by resources sharing among different systems, which
result in a divide between information technologies and the
de facto requirement (Hu et al., 2011). Through service
choreograph, functions in different departments and
62 M. Fantinato et al.
enterprises could be reused. BPM provides a sound solution
to choreograph services. At last, building a business process
warehouse to facilitate reuse business processes is proposed.
4.11 Service orientation in the enterprise (Bosh
et al., 2007)
This paper combines three short contributions from
researches working at industry, in which they address the
needs, solutions, and effects of service orientation in
applications as diverse as mobile telecommunications,
e-government, and logistics (Bosh et al., 2007). From these
three contributions, the third one of them works with reuse
related to the BPM domain having SOA as a basis. The
contribution, by Helbig and Scherdin (Deutsche Post),
presents the subject ‘Creating business value through
flexible IT architecture’. They present the Deutsche Post
initiative to implement a SOA programme that was
business-driven rather than IT-driven. Besides a series of
objectives, this initiative aimed at reusing existing business
services and IT assets. A coordinated set of projects
implemented and reused business services, thus both
creating business value and contributing to a flexible IT
landscape.
4.12 SOA-based precision irrigation decision
support system (Xu et al., 2011)
This work is focused on irrigation decision-making systems
applied to the agriculture field. Xu et al. (2011) applied
SOA, web services, and BPM to propose an irrigation
decision-making system to solve the following problem:
such systems were mostly aimed at a given area and specific
crops; leading to a difficulty of application in different areas
and different crops. Reuse of services, arranged in terms of
BPM, is one of the bases of the concepts treated by the
proposition in this paper. First, user programmed areas, crop
types and the water supply. Secondly, the system selects
optimum services from the BPM based on different inputs,
and then quickly builds a suitable model. Moreover, it gave
precise guidance for crop irrigation processes. The precision
irrigation decision support system provides an on demand
decision-making model for agricultural production. The
authors present applied results showing that the system can
quickly build a decision-making model to meet the needs of
irrigation for different users.
4.13 Where do you want to go in your SOA adoption
journey? (Mulik et al., 2008)
This is an analysis paper provided by Mulik et al. (2008).
Considering that not every company has the same needs in
adopting SOA, the authors compare four options for
increasing system flexibility, which are:
1 reusable business services
2 service-oriented integration (SOI)
3 composite applications
4 a foundation for BPM.
Reuse is the key for all the four options and they can be
seen as a set of layers to be scaled, in a process that can be
multiphased. An organisation can start seeking any of these
outcomes and later decide to aim for another, more
advanced goal. At another extreme, a few organisations
might directly opt for building a foundation for their BPMs
using SOA. Comparing all four options, taking into account
factors such as the up-front investment required versus
system flexibility, the four options are seem as a maturity
scale, in the order previously presented: the reusable
business services approach provides the least flexibility
among the four options, but it also requires the least
up-front investment; on the other extreme, the foundation
for BPM provides more flexibility but it also requires
substantial up-front investment needed.
5 Group 2: pattern-related papers
This section presents the group of papers whose main
characteristic in the reuse aspect is the application of
pattern-related techniques. Patterns is a very used technique
being applied in software engineering aiming at reusing in
the software development process, mainly regarding to the
design patters, which have been the one of the main
inspirations for the application of pattern-related research
works in the BPM domain. This section presents an
overview of this papers and projects related to patterns in
the context of this survey.
5.1 A methodology for domain-specific business
process modelling and implementation (Brahe
and Bordbar, 2009)
Design and implementation of a business process in an
enterprise often requires three groups of experts including
business analysts, solution architects and developers. They
collaborate to transform a high-level business process to a
final executable system. The problem is that a model created
by a business analyst is at a higher level of abstraction and
lacks information regarding the architecture of the system.
Such extra information must be incorporated during the
transformation from the language of the business analyst to
the language of the solution architect. To overcome this
obstacle, Brahe and Bordbar (2009) propose a methodology
and framework based on design patterns. In particular, the
framework enables capturing knowledge required for the
transformation of a model from a high-level to a lower level
of abstraction by introducing reusable patterns into the
transformation mechanism. In order to refine models
without losing the additional information at next
transformation the patterns are parameterised. To handle the
parameters the conventional model driven development is
extended with a pattern template, additional parameters and
transformation rules. The approach allows to capture the
knowledge of how to transform a domain-specific task type
from one abstraction level (e.g., architectural level) to
 A survey on reuse in the business process management domain
another (e.g., development level) with only limited
interference from the architect and the developer. The
approach however has not been evaluated or validated so
far. Moreover, it is based on UML in despite of standard
process notations such as the business process modelling
notation (BPMN).
5.2 A model-driven approach for generating
business process and process interaction
semantics (Zhao et al., 2009)
Several challenges emerge when enabling non-technical
business experts to design business processes that can be
transformed into business process models in different
process modelling languages: how to make the low level
syntax transparent to the business experts and enable them
to concentrate on high-level process model designs; how to
achieve a language-independent business process design
that makes the business process reusable? Zhao et al. (2009)
propose a model-driven approach to generate business
process models and the process interaction semantics
from a language-independent process models. The main
contributions of the approach are: to enable business
analysts to capture process modelling language information
in language independent view of the process model, i.e., the
UML 2.0 business process model; a WS-BPEL metadata
model and a semantics metadata model are used as
stereotypes to specify process modelling language specific
information and process interaction semantics to UML 2.0
business process; a set of patterns for generating WS-BPEL
process models and process semantic files from UML 2.0
business process models. The proposed approach involves
three phases: design where the business process is captured
taking into consideration the interactions between the
business process and its partners, data model including the
variable definitions and usages throughout the business
process models and the control flow model describing the
process tasks execution order; annotation which add
information regarding the syntax and semantics of the
WS-BPEL and generation phase where the business process
model in UML 2.0 is generated to a WS-BPEL process.
Control flow patterns are used to perform control flow
analyses. However, some works still remains to use further
kinds of control flow patterns as well as to enhance the
process correctness and robustness.
5.3 A version management method for managing
business process changes based on
version-stamped business process change
patterns (Lee et al., 2008)
Traditional version management methods of business
process present disadvantages. On one hand, methods based
on timestamps imply the creation of a new process model
every time when a new version evolves. On the other hand,
methods based on tree version stores only one version of the
business process and the change operations between
consecutive versions. Therefore, when the existing version
63
is executing, the method cannot cope with the situation
when a new version is created and deployed. Considering
these limitations, Lee et al. (2008) propose a version
management method based on structural process change
patterns that are closely related to the structure of business
processes. The method allows recognising change that is not
valid as a valid change as well as deploying a new process
version at runtime. As drawback, the approach considers
only structural patterns rather than further workflow
patterns such as activity and interaction patterns.
5.4 Applying activity patterns for developing an
intelligent process modelling tool (Thom et al.,
2008)
Business processes comprise a variety of business functions
(e.g., task execution request, notification, approval) which a
specific and well-defined semantics. In the work of Thom
et al. (2008), these business functions are denoted as
workflow activity patterns; i.e., activity patterns represent
business functions that occur several times within one or
multiple process models, and therefore might be reused
when defining other business processes. The authors
propose seven activity patterns that combined with specific
control flow patterns are suitable to design a large variety of
process models in different domains. An empirical study
proved where 214 real process models were analysed
proved the existence of such activity patterns. The results of
the study are used in the development of an intelligent suite
for normalising (i.e., a canonical format for describing
process models) and modelling business processes based on
the reuse of activity patterns. Given some information about
the kind of process being designed, the results of the study
are used by the suite to suggest a ranking of the activity
patterns suited best to follow the last patterns modelled.
Basically, the suited is intended to provide a number of
advanced modelling functionalities, such as the:
1 the extraction of business processes from legacy
systems and their normalisation, correctness checking
and translation into a standard notation
2 support for designing normalised process models by
suggesting to the designer activity patterns relevant in
the giving modelling context
3 construction of a knowledge base for storing and
retrieving activity patterns.
As drawback, the suite still needs to be implemented in an
existent workflow designer tool and additional analyses
must be performed to identify more common occurrences of
pairs of activity patterns.
5.5 Architecture for end user-driven composition
of underspecified, human-centric business
processes (Stoitsev et al., 2008a)
End user development (EUD) (Stoitsev et al., 2008a) is
defined as a set of method, techniques, and tools that
allow users of software systems, who are acting as
64 M. Fantinato et al.
non-professional software developers to create, modify, or
extend software artefact (e.g., files). The authors describe a
generic architecture for enabling EUD of decentralised
emerging, weakly structured process models. The
architecture supports a framework for lightweight
composition and management of ad hoc business processes.
The main entities of the framework are tasks, artefacts,
human actors and task patterns. The architecture is
implemented in the CTM prototype and has a three-tier
architecture consisting of client, server and persistence
layers. The client layer contains the logic for the personal
task management. The server layer comprises the
components, providing the tracking functionality, the
overall repository access and data retrieval, and the business
logic (e.g., notifications handling). The persistence layer
encompasses the runtime data storage for task tracking and
the user, artefact and task patterns repositories. The solution
builds up on e-mail-integrated task management and enables
dynamic generation of decentralised-emerging process
structures (PS) through web service-based activity tracking.
The approach still requires a long-term CTM evaluation that
allows for scalability assessments for the entities managed
through this architecture.
5.6 Business process compliance through reusable
units of compliant processes (Schumm et al.,
2010)
Compliance management ensures that business processes
are in accordance with specific requirements. Schumm et al.
(2010) consider the process verification at design time
(static) and runtime (dynamic) for ensuring and managing
compliance. The authors present a framework for design-
time business compliance. They introduce a conceptual
model for specifying compliance requirements and discuss
how these requirements can be stored and processed. In
particular, the concept of reusable building block is
presented. Each building block refers to a process fragment
for compliance. This fragment can be integrated into an
existing process to make the process compliant to the
corresponding compliance requirement. However, as there
is no evidence that the compliance fragment has been
inserted in the correct manner and place it is possible that
the process still violates the compliance requirement.
Therefore, the authors propose rules that represent this
compliance requirement in a formal manner. To provide
assurance of compliance, a compliance expert defines and
formalises the requirements to which a particular process
has to comply with. The resulting formal rules are either
associated with existing compliance fragments or with new
ones which are developed in cooperation of the compliance
expert and a process designer. The compliance fragments
that are associated with the rules are then integrated into the
process by the process designer. The subsequent verification
indicates if all rules could be verified, or if changes in the
process are required. Altogether, the main contribution is an
approach that combines the formalisation of compliance
requirements, their automated verification for a given
process and a novel approach for process reuse. Although
the formal language introduced in this paper can be used to
formalise compliance requirements of diverse types,
only those requirements relevant to the control flow of
the business processes can be tackled powerfully with
compliance fragments.
5.7 Granularity as a cognitive factor in the
effectiveness of business process model
reuse (Holschke et al., 2009)
While factors such as psychological anchoring and
task-adequacy in reuse-based modelling tasks have been
investigated, information granularity as a cognitive concept
has not been at the centre of empirical researcher. The
question remains what the optimal granularity for
conceptual models may be, so that decision-makers can
successfully exploit the benefits of model reuse when
managing the enterprise flexibility react to changes.
Holschke et al. (2009) explore these relations by conducting
two studies that make use of conceptual models of different
granularities. In particular, the first study focuses on high
granularity business process model in the form of process
domains. In this study, the granularity in the design task was
set to a relatively coarse level and the participating teams
were asked to design process domains for the whole
enterprise rather than a particular fine granular workflow.
The second study focus on low granularity business process
model in the form of a business process modelled in BPMN.
Therefore, participants of study 1 were randomly reassigned
to new treatment (5 teams) and control groups (6 teams).
The task was to design a business process model of low
granularity under reuse of an available artefact (treatment
group) and without reuse (control group). The findings are
early indications of how the granularity of conceptual
models should be designed so that the IS management of
enterprises employing conceptual models as powerful tools
can be improved. However, the sample size is not
statistically significant but the method used for the study
showed itself satisfactory.
5.8 Incorporating events into cross-organisational
business process (Chakravarty and Singh, 2008)
This paper deals with the question how Web-scale processes
can be implemented for robust enactment. The authors
propose an event-driven architecture (EDA) which
addresses the engineering challenge of incorporating events
in a web process in a reusable manner, i.e., without hard
coding events into a process model. In particular, process
models are captured as protocols. A business protocol in this
context describes messages exchanged among two or more
interacting roles. For each role, the protocol yields a
skeleton consisting of rules that capture applicable temporal
constrains and meanings. In the proposed EDA, an
autonomous business partner is modelled as an agent; a
commitment is a directed conditional obligation from a
debtor to a creditor agent (Chakravarty and Singh, 2008).
Therefore, a debtor commits to creditor that if precondition
 A survey on reuse in the business process management domain
becomes true, debtor will enact condition. When a
precondition holds, debtor becomes unconditionally
committed. Moreover, the EDA requires three information
sources for each agent: a knowledge base, a rule base, and
an event pattern store. The knowledge base contains domain
models as well as facts that change as the enactment
proceeds. Agent rules are based on the skeletons of the roles
an agent plays and on its policies. The approach also shows
how to address anticipated exceptions in modelling or
during configuration. Altogether, the proposed separation of
a process’s core business logic from events in particular
instantiation enables each participant’s local policies to be
much more naturally authored and applied. The approach is
limited concerning the specification of policies for an agent
in a manner that provides guaranteed coverage to the
commitments of the business partner it represents.
5.9 Integration and reuse of data mining in business
processes – a pattern-based approach (Wegener
and Rüping, 2011a)
The work proposed by Wegener and Rüping (2011a) focus
on a formal representation of data mining processes to
facilitate their integration and reuse in business processes as
well as to support a faster identification and handling of
problems due to changes in the process or the data. In
particular, the work is a new approach for the reuse and
integration of existing data mining solutions in business
processes in the context of modern BPM environments. This
includes, based on the cross industry standard process
(CRISP), the definition of data mining process patterns,
which encode reusable data mining solutions at the
appropriate level of generality. Therefore, the main goal is
to integrate and reuse existent data mining processes that
have proven to be successful, and hence to develop a formal
and concrete definition of the steps that are involved in the
data mining process and of the steps that are necessary to
reuse it in new business processes. In contrast to the more
general CRISP model, the data mining patterns are not
applicable in all cases, as several parts of the process are
already pre-defined in the pattern. Details on the definition,
architecture and implementation of the underlying services
are not presented. Important questions still need to be
answered such as how to model the data within the process
and the definition of a data-related interfaces between the
business processes and the data mining patterns as well as
how to get the data out of the business process. In addition,
what is a good pattern, how can the quality of a pattern be
determined and how to select a pattern from a pattern
database.
5.10 Managing simulation workflow patterns using
dynamic service-oriented compositions
(Al-Zoubi and Wainer, 2010)
Distributed simulation deals with executing simulation
geographically interconnected assets. It is usually performed
by partitioning a single model among different logical
processes to perform a single simulation run, or by having a
65
simulation run synchronised among different simulation
models where each model is handled by a different logical
process. Al-Zoubi and Wainer (2010) propose a lightweight
standard based on RESTful web-services for simulations.
Workflows are used to accomplish plugging simulation into
a formal BPM plan. This paper presents the design of a
workflow component that manages and executes workflow
patterns (mainly simulation experiment patterns). It uses
multiple repositories to allow the reuse of workflow patterns
and simulation models. The workflow component follows
the reference model recommended by the workflow
management coalition. In this model, a workflow
component is the centre and interacts with other surrounding
repositories, servers and other workflow components. In the
approach proposed in this paper, the workflow component
uses, as a client, the RISE middleware to create and
manipulate simulation resources (URIs). RISE becomes a
simulation repository manipulated by workflows, allowing
users to access those resources from any web client or
workflow components. Performing simulations through the
RISE middleware prevent workflows of being specific to a
citrating simulation environment, as this functionality is
provided at the RISE middleware. Further, the workflow
component can use several middleware instances
simultaneously, allowing the component to replicate
simulation resources on more than one location, which is
helpful for fault-tolerance and workload distribution.
Although, the approach presents interesting advantages
especially regarding interoperability and dynamicity, there
is still a need on research of how to increase the use of
simulation in industry and how to reduce costs.
5.11 Methodological proposal for BPM sustained in
the use of patterns (Bonillo et al., 2008)
The work by Bonillo et al. (2008) proposes a methodology
that allows the management of the business processes
(BPM) based on the use of patterns. It presents a taxonomy
of patterns and its representation through an architecture
definition language (ADL) into an architecture of processes,
services, and canon objects in the BPM domain. ISO14-598
and ISO-9126 are used as a quality of models of processes
and as the product. It also proposes a group of steps that in
the BPM scope allows to identify the key processes, to
analyse, to simulate and to implement them in an assisted
way. More than to evaluate, monitor and improve them.
Altogether, main contribution of this work are: a language
of patterns for the methodology of BPM with a base in the
construction sustained in software components; an attended
modelled method of applications of software that allows the
audit in diverse stages of the software life cycle; and a
system of practical viable verification of components, i.e.,
the tools can be developed based on network technologies
and the necessary basic knowledge fits in the typical profile
of the professional software development. Although the
methodology is well specified, a prototype still needs to be
developed so that the methodology can be better tested in
practice.
66 M. Fantinato et al.
5.12 On reusing data mining in business processes –
a pattern-based approach (Wegener and
Rüping, 2011b)
The work presented by Wegener and Rüping (2011b)
focuses on the automatic reuse of successful data mining
processes solutions. In this context, it presents a new
process model for reuse and integration of data mining in
different business processes. The approach is based on
CRISO and includes the definition of data mining patterns, a
definition of a hierarchy of tasks to guide the specialisation
of abstract patterns to concrete processes, and a meta-
process for applying patterns to business processes. The
goal of the data mining patterns is to provide a flexible
representation for different levels of generality. The patterns
are reused through a meta-process that starts if a new
application scenario is available and describes the tasks that
can only be performed with knowledge on the application
scenario. The first step to use a pattern is to define the
business objectives of the application and then to select the
data-mining pattern that matches with these objectives. The
tasks of the selected pattern are specified to the executable
level according to the proposed hierarchy or a given
specification is chosen. If it is observed that the pattern
cannot be specified as executable, the meta-process steps
back to the task of choosing a new pattern. Otherwise, it is
deployed into the business process. After that, the integrated
process is executed. If the result is satisfying, the
meta-process is finished and if not the meta-process steps
back to the task of finding a new specification. The main
contribution of the approach is to avoid unnecessary
repetitive work; i.e., if a data mining is to be integrated in
the context of a very similar problem, the pattern can be
used again instead of applying the full CRISP process twice.
However, there are still some open questions such as how to
model the data within the process and ‘is the hierarchy
adequate?’
5.13 Using control patterns in business process
compliance (Namiri and Stojanovic, 2007)
A business process might include internal controls related to
specific risk assessment. The approach proposed by Namiri
and Stojanovic (2007) introduces an abstraction layer above
a business process. Based on the assessed risks, a set of
controls is defined on that layer. By executing a business
process, the semantic process layer will be continually
updated with information needed for the evaluation of
defined controls in order to ensure compliance tests will
pass. This paper proposes two levels of internal control
patterns (i.e., declarative rules): high-level and system level
representing the same thing but on different abstraction
levels in a domain. The high-level control patterns provide
the basis for the terminology in which the compliance
experts communicate about the domain. The system level
control patterns represent a more technical view on the
controls and their introduction is aimed to facilitate the use
of formal methods by system developers/technical personnel
having the task of implementing the controls in ERP/BPM
systems. The approach supports the definition of the
controls outside of the workflow in order to enable the reuse
of process models and controls in different business
environments. However, the selection of the control pattern
is still manual. A risk repository can be built as a higher
level of automation.
5.14 Using control-flow patterns for specifying
business processes in cooperative environments
(Braghetto et al., 2007)
Specification of control-flow in workflow languages has
been an active research area of research. One of the
persistent difficulties in this research area is the evaluation
of specification approaches and comparison among them.
This approach presented by Braghetto et al. (2007) proposes
the use of the navigation plan definition language (BPDL),
as an alternative for control-flow specifications in
cooperative environments. NPDL is based on process
algebra. It adds new operators to compensate for the
limitations of process algebra and Petri nets in representing
control-flows. Moreover, this paper presents a complete
implementation of control-flow patterns proposed by Aalst’s
group in NPDL. This implementation allows comparing
NPDL with process algebra using method suggested by
Aalst’s group. Altogether, the main advantages of NPDL are
to support the modelling of execution-time decisions, to
treat the exclusive choice with operators ‘%’ and ‘%!’ that
enable or disable the execution of a term according
to the return value of a Boolean function performed at
process runtime. The operators ‘&’, ^{^}and ‘?’ of NPDL
do not exist in process algebra and enclose, the behaviour
of multi-merge, discriminator, multiple instances and
interleaved parallel routing patterns. According to the
authors, NPDL not only facilitates the specifying of process
control-flow structures, but it also increases the modelling
flexibility by allowing the reuse of process expressions. One
limitation of the approach is the lack of an automated
generation of NPDL expressions from control-flow patterns
style graphical representations.
6 Group 3: ontology/reasoning-related papers
This section presents the group of papers whose main
characteristic in the reuse aspect is the application of
techniques related to ontology or reasoning mechanisms.
The focus of most commercial BPM systems has been on
structured business process. However, they still have to
evolve in order to support the required dynamism of
organisations. To achieve this goal, one of the directions of
research enhances BPM systems with artificial intelligence
techniques such as ontologies and reasoning. Some of these
works are described below.
 A survey on reuse in the business process management domain
6.1 A goal-based business service selection
approach (Kritikos and Kubicki, 2011)
Most of the process design and realisation approaches
cannot select the appropriate business combination
alternative in a precise way when quality attributes are
considered. With this objective, Kritikos and Kubicki
(2011) propose an approach that finds the best way to
compose services from other services according to
functional and non-functional requirements. One of the
considered criteria when choosing the best composition is
the percentage of services reused. Composition considers
which services are able to achieve which goals and
according to which cost and non-functional constraints. The
main advantages of the proposed approach in service
composition and selection are the following:
1 it is able to propose service combinations even when
there is a missing functionality in terms of partially
satisfied or unfulfilled required goals
2 it proposes only semantically robust solutions
3 it considers novel optimisation criteria, such as the
number of services constituting the proposed solution
and the percentage of services re-used.
Functional and non-functional characteristics of services are
semantically described. Limitations such as dealing with
retrieving algorithms of NP-complexity will be treated in
future work.
6.2 A process component model for enterprise
business knowledge reuse (Mou et al.,
2004)/research on business goal-oriented
PK retrieving (Mou et al., 2005)
Process knowledge (PK), seen as the knowledge an
organisation holds and refers to in process modelling and
execution may be very large. With the increased experience
in BPM, the collection and reuse of PK is an important
factor improving the efficiency and quality of BPM. Mou
et al. (2004, 2005) propose a semantic-based framework for
PK description and retrieving. The authors consider two
kinds of PK: general and organisational specific. The
general PK is a high-level process description for a trade or
a set of trades. Organisation specific PK includes detailed
information on business process definition and context data
describing the organisation’s specific business goal and
environment. The reusable PK is organised into process
units. A process unit is the description about a process and
its related knowledge including the process definition, the
process interface, function information describing the
problem the process is intended to solve or the business goal
to achieve, and the QoS information describing the
processes executing performance. User-defined goal
description is transformed into PK description, and used as
input for a PK semantic retrieving operation together with
other information such as context and QoS. The main
advantages are: high-level description of process-related
information based on goals, advanced search capabilities
67
using description logic-based knowledge expression and
reasoning ability, efficient retrieval as the information in the
repository is stored in OWL-DL.
6.3 Case-based maintenance for CCBR-based
process evolution (Weber et al., 2006)
Enterprises depend more and more on their ability to change
regarding market, legislation or technology. Combining
process management techniques and conversational
case-based reasoning (CCBR) allows for this required
flexibly. This includes the adaptation of business processes
to changing needs by allowing deviations from the
predefined process model, the memorisation and the reuse
of deviations, and the derivation of process improvements
from cases. CCBR is an extension of the CBR paradigm,
which actively involves users in the inference process. A
CCBR system guides users through a question-answering
sequence in order to retrieve a case. Weber et al. (2006)
extend previous works in which case retrieval is based on
CCBR to deal with the whole process life cycle. They
propose a framework for integrated process life cycle
support allowing the derivation of improved process
models. In their approach, a case represents a concrete ad
hoc modification of one or more process instances. It
provides the context of and the reasons for the deviation.
The reasons for the change are described as question-answer
(QA) pairs, each of which denotes one particular condition.
The answer can be either free text or a structured answer
expression that can be evaluated automatically. When
deviations from the predefined process schema become
necessary, the user initiates a case retrieval with the CCBR
component. The system then assists her/him by presenting a
set of questions. Based on this, similar cases are searched in
the case-based. The user can select one of the cases for
reuse. When a particular ad hoc modification is frequently
reused, the process engineer is notified that a process type
change may have to be performed. This CCBR-based
approach contributes significantly to improving process life
cycle support.
6.4 Collaboration as a reusable component in BPM
(Shepherdson et al., 2008)
Effective cooperation among actors in a business process is
not yet completely achieved in most process-aware ISs. This
paper proposes an approach to integrating collaboration
among process actors as a major construct of business
process modelling and describes an implementation in the
form of reusable software components based on a multi-
agent platform (Shepherdson et al., 2008). In this work, a
business process comprises a set of PS and a set of process
collaborations (PC). PS is a set of process objects that
define the basic structures of process coordination such as
tasks, transitions among tasks, process roles and data that
should be used in the process. On the other hand, PC is a set
of collaboration services required to achieve task level
goals. A collaboration service is defined by its goals,
ontologies, participating roles, interaction protocols and
68 M. Fantinato et al.
state-transition machines that schedule the behaviour of
participating roles to achieve the collaboration goal. A
collaboration service is implemented as a software
component that can be reused by multiple business
processes. It has three sub-components: a collaboration
planner, a scheduler and a state-transition machine. The
collaboration planner uses the interaction protocol, role,
ontology and action description to plan the actions of the
role and pass the plan to the scheduler. The scheduler
executes the plan depending on the content of incoming
(or outgoing) messages and updates the status of the
state-transition machine. Besides including collaboration
among process actors in business process modelling,
another contribution of the work is providing collaboration
services as reusable software components.
6.5 Decision-enabled dynamic process management
for networked enterprises (Deokar and El-Gayar,
2010)
Current process modelling and management techniques do
not integrate decision models and tools in BPM
environments. Moreover, the ability to share and reuse
decision models that support business process is another
important requirement. To meet these objectives, Deokar
and El-Gayar (2010) present a framework for decision-
enabled dynamic BPM. The framework includes the
structured modelling paradigm for representing decision
models and hierarchical task networks from the artificial
intelligence planning area for process modelling. In this
work, process modelling is goal-oriented including syntactic
as well as semantic information. The two main components
of the framework are: the process management platform;
and, the decision model management platform. The process
management component is comprised of a process modeller,
a process execution and monitoring engine, and a resources
administrator. The process modeller is essentially a planner
that uses the domain description, and the initial state
information to find a feasible process model (i.e., a plan) for
a planning problem (i.e., a network of tasks to be
completed). The execution and monitoring engine executes
process plans but may trigger re-planning in case of
exceptions or changes in the environment. The resource
administrator component provides access to auxiliary
application services. The decision model management
platform is comprised of two main components: a
model administrator responsible for administering and
managing models and associated meta-models, and a
model-processing engine responsible for handling requests
from the process execution and monitoring engine. The
main contributions of the work are: the approach provides
integration of decision models in BPM, enables decision
model reuse and, finally, allows dynamic process adaption.
6.6 Extended ontology-based process management
architecture (Liu et al., 2011)
The reuse of knowledge involved in process management is
still low and most of the organisations cannot reuse existing
knowledge effectively because of the gap between
process models and their actual deployment. In order to
eliminate this gap, Liu et al. (2011) propose an extended
ontology-based process management architecture. They
identify six ontologies in process management, including
process ontology, organisation ontology, resource ontology,
knowledge ontology, object ontology and constraint
ontology. Based on these six ontologies, a four-level process
management architecture is presented to show how it reuses
the context-related knowledge in process execution. The
four levels are data level, model level, instance level and
executing level. The data level is composed of ontologies
from which process models can be created. Instances are
created in the layer above using process models. In the task
layer, according to the mentioned ontologies, tasks,
authorisations, resources and process can be recognised
automatically allowing task execution by proper resources
and actors. The main contribution of this proposal is to
achieve knowledge reuse in process management.
6.7 Improving flexibility and reusage of BPM:
the role of cased-based reasoning technique
(Yao et al., 2006)
When processes are very complex, BPM systems do not yet
provide the required flexibility and reuse facilities. The
work discussed by Yao et al. (2006) uses case-based
reasoning (CBR) in BPMS to improve the former aspects.
The approach is composed of four stages: case retrieval,
case reuse, case revision and case retain. The nearest
neighbour method is used for case retrieval in the
knowledge base. After some similar cases are presented
ordered by similarity degree, the user determines which case
should be adopted or improved manually. Case retention
involves selecting which information from the case to retain
and how to integrate the new case in the knowledge base.
The innovative features are mainly related to the proposed
retrieval algorithm for case retrieving.
6.8 OntoMove: a knowledge-based framework for
semantic requirement profiling and resource
acquisition (Bhatt et al., 2007)
Considering that ontology development is a time-consuming
process involving a number of domain experts, facilities to
improve its reuse should be provided. Typical forms of
reuse are restricted to refined versions of an existing
ontology, contracting or expanding the knowledge
contained therein. Within this context, the proposed
framework (Bhatt et al., 2007) supports ontology
reuse through a sub-ontology extraction methodology
and information retrieval based on the concept of a
sub-ontology. Resources such as process templates or data
sets should be categorised using a well-defined ontology
that is comprehensively representative of the resource
domain. From the initial requirement specification, a profile
of the requesting client (application or user) is derived based
on the concept of a sub-ontology. Once a context has been
established in the form of a requirement profile, resource
 A survey on reuse in the business process management domain
retrieval performed within the context of the profile narrows
the range of the resources (in the resource repository) by
including only those resources that are representative of the
semantic types present in the context. The novelty of this
work is that it generates user/component/application specific
tailored sub-ontologies as well as the set of data-sources that
are relevant to the tailored requirement of every client.
6.9 Process and services fusion impact assessment
(Demirkan and Goul, 2007)
The approach called ‘process and services fusion impact
assessment’ (p&sfia) (Demirkan and Goul, 2007) creates an
organisational roadmap to realise visions of how to deliver
reliable, scalable enterprise processes built upon SOA. The
intent of p&sfia is to map strategy to workable solutions.
Aspects that turn p&sfia viable are a chronology of eight
lessons learned, a conceptual model and a generic reuse
approach. The ontology-based conceptual model takes
practical use cases and maps their business process activities
to service structures with individual services mapped to
infrastructure. These mappings or transformation points
represent opportunities for reuse. The proposed
methodology fosters the collaboration between business
process and IT stakeholders and cultural change in
organisations.
6.10 XML and knowledge-based process model
reuse and management in business intelligence
system (Ou and Peng, 2006)
In order to provide the business intelligence system with the
ability of process-driven decision-making, Ou and Peng
(2006) introduce the concept of BPM to the current business
intelligence system. In the knowledge-based process model
management system (KBPMS) proposed, hybrid technology
of CBR and rule-based reasoning (RBR) are combined to
facilitate reuse and management of process models. The
business process model includes a combination of four main
ontologies: domain ontology, task ontology, activity
ontology and event ontology, defined in RDF. The process
model template can be reused and specialised to make
models that are more sophisticated. According to different
input of users, there are two kinds of methods for case
retrieval: goal-driven case retrieval and attribute-driven case
retrieval. If the user only provides the aim of the process he
wanted, goal-driven case retrieval will be used and related
cases will be selected based on the combination of domain
and task. If the user knows part of the structure of the target
process, attribute-driven case retrieval can be used.
Attribute-driven case retrieval is based on similarity
matching. If no satisfactory process model is obtained, the
user can develop his process from the beginning. After the
user has finished process model composition, domain
knowledge and business rules are used to verify whether a
new process model is reasonable. Measures for feasibility
judgment include activity sequence reasonability; constraint
satisfaction and other domain dependent requirements. If the
process model can fulfil the requirements of evaluation and
69
it is confirmed by the user, it is then stored in the process
model base. The innovative features proposed are:
combination of RBR and case-base reasoning that can
overcome the limitations of these two methods; strategy for
data mining experience reuse that makes data mining
process more efficient.
7 Group 4: variant/pl-related papers
This section presents the group of papers whose main
characteristic in the reuse aspect is the application of
techniques related to PLs or variabilities mechanisms. BPM
presents itself as a potential domain for the application of
PL techniques in order to provide systematic reuse. Variants
in business processes may indicate important features for
the competitiveness of organisations and their management
should be supported by BPM systems.
7.1 A PL for BPM (Gimenes et al., 2008)
This paper proposes the use of feature modelling for
handling e-contracts. A meta-model based on features
enables the specification of Web service contracts. The
proposed approach includes a mechanism for mapping
contracts to business processes. In the approach, the contract
establishment process comprises five stages grouped in two
life cycles (Gimenes et al., 2008). The contract template
development cycle starts with e-service feature model
elaboration. Two feature models are elaborated for the two
parts of the contract. A contract template is created based on
the feature models. Then web services are developed and
published. For the contract instance development life cycle,
the feature models are configured. Finally, a contract is
generated based on the feature model configurations. The
process that implements the proposed approach is
automated by means of a support toolkit. Contracts created
by following the approach are more systematic than when it
is not used, as it allows for information reuse. This is
accomplished by applying common points and variabilities
to represent e-services. Web service contracts are created
from the configuration of the feature model of e-services.
Thus, this feature model provides a mechanism from which
Web service contracts can be quickly generated.
7.2 Bridging software PLs and SOAs for service
identification using BPM and FM (Kang and
Baik, 2010)
According to these authors, existing approaches to service-
oriented PL suffer from the fact that their building blocks
have not been merged at the model view level. Thus, this
paper tackles the challenge of identifying services for the
development of SOA PL (Kang and Baik, 2010). It proposes
an approach to bridging software PL and SOA for service
identification using business process models and feature
models. This bridging is accomplished by using a service
bus layer between a business process model and a feature
model. In order to determine the service needed, an
70 M. Fantinato et al.
invocation point is extracted from a business process. The
service bus includes the essential services. In addition, the
major functions to configure features are provided by it. As
a result, the approach enables the reuse of PL and SOA. The
approach proposed in this paper offers a service
identification method, which deals with a service-composed
system that can reflect business processes. A workflow
model that follows the rules of the BPMN is also used by
the method in order to receive the flow of business process
requirements. A workflow can present the services and its
message flow can be recognised in the system according to
the business requirements. The method includes the steps of
service invocation, configuration and specification. The
business view is projected directly into services as can be
assured by the business process model, which is also used
for the input of service identification.
7.3 Experimental studies of e-contract establishment
in the PL4BPM context (Gonçalves et al., 2011)
This paper presents results of two experimental studies
carried out to evaluate PL approach for BPM domain
(PL4BPM), an approach to e-contract establishment and
other BPM activities (Gonçalves et al., 2011). It applies PL
concepts to enable process reuse mainly by using feature
modelling to improve the specification of e-contracts. The
e-contract establishment process in the context of PL4BPM
is the aim of the studies presented in this paper. The
academic environment is considered for the first study, in
the scope of in vitro studies, whereas the second one is done
in the industrial environment, as a survey with participants
from the software development industry. The focus of the
assessment of the proposed approach is on its usability and
feasibility. Thus, the benefits of the approach are evaluated
against ad hoc procedures by the participants from both
academia and industry in the studies. The results of the
studies provide strong evidences of the proposed approach
advantages. This paper is important as currently there is a
lack of experimental data on e-contract approaches, which
can be considered a recent area. Time and effort needed to
learn specification language syntax in ad hoc approaches
can be saved when following the PL4BPM approach.
Moreover, PL4BPM is considered easy to use as a
consequence of its well defined stages. In addition to
this usability advantage, the approach supports the
understanding of the process of e-contract establishment by
the involved parts due to the use of feature modelling.
Overall, the PL4BPM approach is considered feasible.
7.4 Model-driven development of families of SOAs
(Asadi et al., 2009)
The integration of software PL engineering and model
driven engineering is proposed by the authors of this paper
in order to enable the model driven specification of software
services, which can support the creation of software
products from a software service family. This paper shows
the support provided by model driven engineering through
the injection of the set of required commonalities and
variabilities of a software system from a high-level process
design to the lower levels of service use. The methodology
proposed in this paper combines software PL engineering
and model driven engineering to bridge the gap between
BPM and software engineering. The authors demonstrate
that domain engineering can be conducted across the layers
of business processes, unit services, service interfaces and
service implementations so that the SOA families can be
considered from their business process specification to their
concrete implementation. Furthermore, they demonstrate
how business process requirements can be combined with
technical requirements of software engineers by applying
model driven engineering principles so that service interface
implementation is provided for business activities and unit
services. Thus, a view of a composed system, which is
consistent from the perspective of business administration to
lower service implementation and deployment levels, can be
provided by using the proposed method, which includes two
main life cycles. The domain scoping, family requirement
analysis, business process family design, business process
family annotation, business process family realisation and
service interface implementation phases define the cycle of
domain engineering. The application engineering life cycle
includes the phases of application requirement analysis,
application design and application implementation.
7.5 On managing business processes variants (Lu
et al., 2009)
This paper deals with the issue of variant in business
process execution, including instance adaptation support
techniques and management of process variants. It
highlights the importance of managing process variants in
order to ensure organisations wide consistency and promote
reuse. With this demand in mind, the authors of this paper
propose an approach for BPM that supports dynamic change
and flexibility in execution. The concept of process
constraints provides the base for the proposed approach,
which supports the use of adaptations manifested in process
variants and includes a framework for instance adaptation to
support flexible BPM. The framework includes two main
components. The business process constraint network
provides the environment for constraint modelling to
facilitate instance adaptation and the process variant
repository provides a characterisation to describe the work
practices represented by variants. The approach includes a
mechanism for preferred variant discovery based on process
similarity. In order to accomplish this, multiple aspects of
process variants are compared according to query
requirements. Thus, the approach allows for the definition
of a quantitative measure for the similarity between process
variants. Part of the process modelling effort goes to domain
experts and execution decisions are made at runtime.
Instance-specific process model specification and constraint
checking in different business process variants support
instance adaptation. This paper shows how the specification
of selection and scheduling constraints supports increased
process execution flexibility with the desired level of
 A survey on reuse in the business process management domain
control. A query formalisation and progressive-refinement
technique for variant retrieval supports the management of
process variants.
7.6 On the discovery of preferred work practice
through business process variants (Lu and Sadiq,
2007)
The value of variants in BPM is considered in this paper.
Process variant as an information resource and its
management establish the scenario from which the concept
of process similarity is focused. This paper supports search
and retrieval of process variants by offering a theoretical
foundation for query specification and processing. The
approach is intended to dynamic instance adaptation and
process discovery. Methods for searching and matching
process variants against a given query from simple to
complex aspects are included, in addition to the generation
of result sets that can be ranked. The authors propose an
approach for using retained process variants based on a
similarity measure. A query formalisation technique is
proposed in order to enable the structural specification of
the properties of process variants to be retrieved. A
progressive refinement technique for retrieval query
processing is also provided. Thus, in this paper, the authors
define a process variant schema that establishes the base on
which various query types and their formalisations are
considered. They also define a quantitative measure for
variant similarity, which covers different dimensions such
as structural, behavioural and contextual, to determine the
degree of desired and actual process variant matching.
Finally, a query processing technique is presented, which
features an approach for query execution that includes a
ranking technique for partial matches.
7.7 PPM to manage business process variants
(Pascalau et al., 2011)
This paper addresses the issue of managing process variant
consistency and reducing the redundancy between process
variants. The approach created in order to deal with this
issue is called partial process models (PPM). It is a
query-based approach that uses process model view
definition in order to maintain the link between variant
process models. A visual query language for business
process models called BPMN-Q is used to define views,
which employ an inheritance methodology. The process
modeller can get updated and consistent process model
status as assured by the dynamic evaluation for the defined
process view queries. PPM offer a top-down approach as
well as a bottom-up approach through which process model
variants can be dealt with in a flexible way. By defining
queries on process models, the approach deals with the
problem identified in this paper. Process queries are seen as
a reuse support and BPMN-Q is used to create queries on
other processes. Inherited behaviour can be extended or
limited by variants. Thus, a means to define new
functionalities in variants is needed and queries can be seen
as a means to reuse or restrict process behaviour in a
71
variant, whereas keeping process-variants consistency. PPM
architecture includes the following main components. The
process modelling, querying and composition environment
component provides graphical interface. The process model
repository component supports process model storage. The
query processor component evaluates queries and the
resultant views are sent to the model composer.
7.8 Requirements and tools for variability
management (Aiello et al., 2010)
Variability in BPM is the subject of this paper, which is
addressed by providing a definition of variability and related
concepts. Then, the authors define and classify a
fundamental set of requirements for variability management
tools. The authors organise the requirements in categories.
Expressive power deals with the power for expressing
variability and its requirements indicate features that should
be expressed, including structural variation, constraint
expressions and variation relations. Service requirements
include requirements that are specific to service-based
processes with variability, such as late service discovery and
variable quality of service. Consistency and fault handling
deal with requirements related to the consistency and fault
handling issues, which include business rules, unreachable
states, variable fault handlers, variable roll back procedures
and data flow. Finally, evolution requirements include
requirements related to the management of evolution of
processes with variability, including variants, running
instances and updates. Tools are compared based on the
requirements. They include process variants by options,
variability extension to business process execution
language, ADEPT, configurable workflow models,
DECLARE framework, and business process constraint
network and process variant repository. As a result, the
authors notice that there is no tool that is able to address all
or even most of the requirements.
7.9 Synchronisation of adaptive process models
using levels of abstraction (Weidmann et al.,
2011)
An approach is proposed in this paper, which supports
business process creation and adaptation on different
abstraction levels. It is based on reusable process building
blocks. Abstraction levels are introduced, which enable
adaptive process model definition in different granularity.
The use of process fragments in templates ensures
adaptivity. Process fragment changes are propagated
through abstraction levels enabling process model
synchronisation. As a benefit, the approach allows process
changes to be similarly driven by information technology
and business. This paper defines process building
blocks, synchronisation mechanisms and a supporting
infrastructure. By following the proposed approach, process
models can be adapted from multiple abstraction levels,
though they can be standardised. Conceptual model for
synchronisation of adaptive business processes includes
three solution elements. The adaptive process element
72 M. Fantinato et al.
includes supporting concepts, such as process items, process
variants, process building blocks, process fragments,
process templates, variable regions, predefined region and
free region. The process synchronisation element includes
dependency concepts, including intra and inter level
dependencies. The solution infrastructure element includes
support for applying changes, keeping process items and
synchronising process models.
8 Group 5: other papers
This section presents the group of papers that were not
classified in none of the previous four groups, being
grouped into this extra group. There are four papers that
have no special characteristic in common with the previous
four categories.
8.1 A P2P approach for business process modelling
and reuse (Rodrigues et al., 2006)
This paper proposes the use of a peer-to-peer (P2P) tool,
named business process cooperative editor (BPCE), to
exchange processes models, promoting a ‘natural’
standardisation, in context of distributed software
development. The BPCE focuses on the improvement of
models, the optimisation of modelling activities, and the
reuse of models among organisations (Rodrigues et al.,
2006). The proposed tool also allows for the enhancement
of existing models, through an evolutionary approach that
helps in organisational learning. It is implemented as a
four-layer architecture:
1 infrastructure layer – responsible for the P2P primitives
2 repository layer – responsible for storing local models
3 searcher layer – having the mechanisms for finding
models (the ‘searcher’), which can be aggregated to
build a new model, using COPPEER1 resources
4 editor layer – holding the graphical environment with
resources to modelling (the ‘editor’).
For evaluating the approach adequacy, a preliminary
analysis of the proposed system was conducted. In general,
BPCE facilitates the development of new business process
models, through reuse. However, there are some negative
aspects of this approach. Some of them are expected to be
mitigated, but some may require extra effort (Rodrigues
et al., 2006), including:
1 trust
2 participation
3 diversity of modelling language
4 diversity of tools.
8.2 Collaborative process modelling and reuse
evaluation (Tomaz et al., 2009)
Tomaz et al. (2009) propose an extension of the P2P
approach for business process modelling for BPM
(Rodrigues et al., 2006). In this work, tool implementation
issues are described, as a modelling case study. A
simulation was conducted using the tool and the changes in
the original proposal (Rodrigues et al., 2006). The results
shows that BPCE can minimise the time to develop new
models, reduce the differences among similar business
processes conducted in distinct organisation units, enhance
the quality of process design and promote reuse. As future
works, Tomaz et al. (2009) intend to perform an experiment
to investigate the effectiveness of the tool for process
standardisation, preferably in a real world scenario.
8.3 Managing process assets in a global IT service
delivery environment (Buco et al., 2011)
In this paper, Buco et al. (2011) present lessons learned at
IBM and describe a system to manage, govern and evolve
process assets on global scale by leveraging expertise of the
entire IT service delivery community: BPMS. According to
authors, the global management and reuse of IT delivery
process assets at all levels is a no longer desired objective
but rather business imperative. In addition, at IBM, the
enterprise level IT service delivery process have been
managed and continually improved for many years at a
global level. However, efforts to standardise across teams
for areas of interest have had limited success. Thus, as a
global repository for process, BPMS is an essential
component in eliminating variability and driving process
standardisation. BPMS was designed to be scalable and
extensible solution for managing process assets. Some of
the key design points were (Buco et al., 2011):
1 crowd computing
2 governance
3 linking of assets
4 continuous improvement.
Their findings show that managing a large-scale process
assets repository for a large community of users presents a
number of challenges but return in terms of reduced cost
and increased quality is also considerable and a critical
success factor in today’s economy.
8.4 Towards IS supported coordination in emergent
business processes (Marjanovic, 2005)
The main objective of this paper is to investigate ISs
supported coordination in emergent business process (EBP)
(Marjanovic, 2005). EBP is the new term used to describe
dynamic knowledge-intensive business processes. As
business processes are becoming increasingly complex,
people involved need more support to monitor and
coordinate their activities and tasks. In this context,
workflow technology has been widely recognised as the
 A survey on reuse in the business process management domain
leading process-oriented coordination tool. Workflows are
designed to specify, execute, manage, monitor and
streamline business processes that span the functional
boundaries in an organisation (Marjanovic, 2005). However,
not all business processes fit the above description. In a
dynamic business environment, many processes evolve
during process execution as employees are faced with new
situations that require solving and therefore require support
for knowledge creation, sharing and reuse. The main
conclusion of this paper is that coordination in knowledge-
intensive processes is, in fact, a knowledge-intensive
process itself, and hence it cannot be fully pre-defined.
Therefore, automation of such process is neither desirable
nor possible. Finally, each IS requirement, proposed in this
paper, identifies a number of further research and
implementation challenges related to support of knowledge-
intensive business process. Thus, current and future works
in this area include: research on the process context and
dynamic PK-repositories.
9 Discussion
Based on the information presented in the previous sections,
a series of analyses can be done to a broad understanding of
this area. A more basic analysis has been performed, with
the separation of the 52 papers in five major groups. After
this paper reading, some additional overall data could be
obtained, as summarised below in this section.
BPM and reuse has proved its relevance in a wide range
of application domains such as electric power industry
(Zhang et al., 2010, 2012); science (Karastoyanova, 2010);
agriculture (Xu et al., 2011); mobile telecommunication
(Bosh et al., 2007); e-government (Bosh et al., 2007);
logistics (Mou et al., 2004); factory construction (Hu et al.,
2011); collaborative e-learning (Fang Fang and Chien Sing,
2009); decision-support systems (Xu et al., 2011);
architecture, engineering, and construction (Kritikos and
Kubicki, 2011); and, medical ISs (Bhatt et al., 2007).
In spite of BPM acceptance, there are still some issues
to be dealt with. Dynamic environments require more
flexibility and competitiveness requires quick development.
The surveyed papers treat the problem of reuse in order to
improve business process development. Reuse techniques
extends existing methods from other areas such as:
• software engineering – components (Fang et al., 2009),
patterns (Brahe and Bordbar, 2009; Zhao et al., 2009;
Lee et al., 2008; Thom et al., 2008; Stoitsev et al.,
2008a; Schumm et al., 2010; Holschke et al., 2009;
Wegener and Rüping, 2011a, 2011b; Al-Zoubi and
Wainer, 2010; Bonillo et al., 2008; Namiri and
Stojanovic, 2007; Braghetto et al., 2007), and PL
(Gimenes et al., 2008; Kang and Baik, 2010; Gonçalves
et al., 2011; Asadi et al., 2009)
• artificial intelligence – ontologies (Kritikos and
Kubicki, 2011; Mou et al., 2004; Shepherdson et al.,
2008; Liu et al., 2011; Bhatt et al., 2007; Demirkan and
Goul, 2007; Mou et al., 2005; Ou and Peng, 2006),
73
reasoning (Mou et al., 2004, 2005), CBR (Weber et al.,
2006; Yao et al., 2006), combination of CBR and
RBR (Ou and Peng, 2006)
• distributed systems – web services (Zhang et al., 2010;
Stoitsev et al., 2008b, 2008c; Meng et al., 2008; Xiong
et al., 2011; Xu et al., 2011).
The reused artefacts vary widely. Among them, one may
cite:
• services (Kritikos and Kubicki, 2011; Zhang et al.,
2012; Fang et al., 2009; Gîrbea et al., 2010; Fang Fang
and Chien Sing, 2009; Karastoyanova, 2010; Demirkan
and Goul, 2007; Hu et al., 2011; Bosh et al., 2007;
Mulik et al., 2008), and more specifically web services
(Zhang et al., 2010; Stoitsev et al., 2008b, 2008c;
Menget al., 2008; Xiong et al., 2011; Xu et al., 2011)
• process model (Meng et al., 2008; Holschke et al.,
2009; Ou and Peng, 2006)
• cases (Weber et al., 2006; Yao et al., 2006)
• collaboration service comprising goals, ontologies,
participating roles, interaction protocols and
state-transition machine (Shepherdson et al., 2008)
• ontologies (Liu et al., 2011; Chakravarty and Singh,
2008)
• PK including the process definition, the process
interface, function information describing the problem
the process is intended to solve or the business goal to
achieve, and the QoS information describing the
processes executing performance (Mou et al., 2004,
2005; Bhatt et al., 2007; Marjanovic, 2005)
• decision models (Deokar and El-Gayar, 2010).
Other aspects also contemplated by these works include:
• performance, flexibility to changes (Weber et al., 2006;
Deokar and El-Gayar, 2010; Gîrbea et al., 2010;
Stoitsev et al., 2008c; Karastoyanova, 2010)
• integration of heterogeneous systems/interoperability
(Hu et al., 2011)
• version management (Lee et al., 2008)
• service composition and selection according to
functional and non-functional requirements (Kritikos
and Kubicki, 2011)
• compliance management (Schumm et al., 2010)
• integration of decision models into BPM (Deokar and
El-Gayar, 2010)
• process variants (Lu et al., 2009; Lu and Sadiq, 2007;
Pascalau et al., 2011; Aiello et al., 2010; Weidmann
et al., 2011)
• adaptive process (Weidmann et al., 2011)
• P2P approach (Rodrigues et al., 2006; Tomaz et al.,
2009)
74 M. Fantinato et al.
• global IT service delivery (Buco et al., 2011).
Finally, some works focus on different phases of process
life cycle:
• modelling extending BPML (Meng et al., 2008)
• modelling presenting an integrated approach for
enabling collaboration between business users, end-user
tailors and developers (Stoitsev et al., 2008b, 2008c)
• language-independent process design (Zhao et al.,
2009)
• selection and composition of services (Kritikos and
Kubicki, 2011)
• PK acquisition/retrieval (Bhatt et al., 2007; Mou et al.,
2005)
• process modelling (Deokar and El-Gayar, 2010; Liu
et al., 2011; Holschkeet al., 2009; Pascalau et al., 2011)
• case retrieval algorithm (Yao et al., 2006)
• modelling with reuse of activity patterns (Thom et al.,
2008).
10 Conclusions
Considering the importance of reuse approaches and
techniques for the BPM domain, several research projects
have already been developed in this area in the last years.
This paper presents a survey composed through a literature
review that was carried out to systematically find these
works, describe them and perform an overall discussion
about them.
In brief, 52 papers were identified specifically related to
‘reuse in the BPM domain’ through a search mechanism of
an important database that indexes papers from the most
important digital libraries and publishers, with respect to
international events and journals. After application of the
literature review protocol, such papers were separated into
five groups so that they could be better analysed, understood
and explained, which are: SOA-based; pattern-based;
ontology/reasoning-based; variants/PL-based; and other.
Considering the distribution of these 52 papers in terms
of publication years, it is observed that only in the last four
years there were a great number of published papers,
although the first publications have begun in 2004.
Considering the distribution in terms of publication type, it
is observed that only 29% of these 52 papers have been
published in journals in contrast to conferences and
workshops, which means that most of them refers to not so
mature and complete works in terms of proposals and
evaluations. Nevertheless, the rate of papers published in
journals has been increasing in the last year, what may
indicate a maturity increase of the research area.
In terms of topics being addressed in this papers,
Session 9 showed that they are quite diverse. On the other
hand, it is also notable that there still is much room for
extending other reuse techniques and approaches already
well established in other areas of computer science, such as
software engineering, so that they can be applied to the
BPM domain.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by The State of São Paulo
Research Foundation (Fapesp).
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Notes
1 An environment for developing and running P2P applications.
It implements a P2P environment under the complex adaptive
systems (CAS) paradigm.