X Preface to Third Edition

interacting processes, the respective section has been dropped. The definition
of relaxed soundness is now much more concise and, I think, also much more
elegant than it was in the previous edition of this book.
To conclude, I am happy to acknowledge the support of our students and
members of the Business Process Technology research group. HPI student
Leon Bein not only spotted a subtle error in the mapping of an EPC to a
Petri net in the relaxed soundness section, but he also helped drafting
figures in the business decision modeling chapter. Thanks to Adriatik Nikaj
and Jan Ladleif for their feedback on the updated and improved choreography
chapter. The comments by Kimon Batoulis and Luise Pufahl on business
decision modeling and decision soundness helped improving the readability
and consistency of these additions to the BPM book.

Potsdam, March 2019 M.W.

Preface to Second Edition

Since the first edition of this book was published in late 2007, the business pro-
cess management area has enjoyed an amazing development, both in industry
and academia. To organize change and to achieve higher degrees of automa-
tion, more and more companies and public administrations put processes in
the centre of their attention.
While changing business requirements, paired with cost and time pressure
are the driving forces of this development, important factors are dependable
standards, sophisticated tools, and well educated people. Many young profes-
sionals graduating in computer science, business engineering, or related fields
have enjoyed an education in business process management, focusing on com-
plementary topics that range from technical aspects to business aspects.
The business process management area is also fueled by the BPM Aca-
demic Initiative, which provides a professional process modeling and analysis
tool free of charge for users in teaching and academic research. Today more
than ten thousand students, lecturers, and researchers use this platform. I
thank my colleagues in the core team for their involvement, namely Wil van
der Aalst, Frank Leymann, Jan Mendling, Michael zur Mühlen, Jan Recker,
Michael Rosemann, and Gero Decker. Also in the name of the platform users,
a special thanks to the Signavio team for providing this service to the BPM
community.
Just like the first edition, this book does not contain any teaching exercises.
However, students and lecturers working with this book can register at the
BPM Academic Initiative at academic.signavio.com to access a comprehensive
set of teaching material related to this book, and beyond. The material is
published under a Creative Commons license, allowing lecturers to use and
adapt the exercises according to their syllabi. All figures of this book can be
downloaded from bpm-book.com.
It is interesting to see that the increasing adoption of business process
technology poses interesting challenges to the research community. One of
these challenges is to closer relate process models with the actual execution
of the business processes. Since about a decade, an impressive body of work

XI
XII Preface to Second Edition

was done in process mining and business process intelligence. There are fur-
ther topics that have emerged as challenges in real-world settings, such as
compliance checking of process models, process model abstraction, and the
management of process repositories, where issues like behavioural similarity
and indexing of process models are investigated. Unfortunately, a text book
on business process management cannot cover all these topics.
Still, this second edition contains a number of enhancements and modi-
fications. The increasing importance of the BPMN in Version 2 is matched
by extending significantly the respective section in the process orchestrations
chapter. I also added a section on BPMN in the process choreographies chapter
to discuss the language constructs for expressing process interactions, conver-
sations, and choreographies. A concrete consistency criterion for process or-
chestrations implementing behavioural interfaces is introduced, which makes
the discussion of the consistency property more tangible. In the process prop-
erties chapter, I extended the section on data in processes, which now also
covers properties of a business process with respect to the data objects it
works on. To improve the integration of the business process management
methodology with the concepts introduced in the first part of the book, I
rewrote the methodology chapter. It now discusses the relationships between
business processes in much more detail and it also introduces performance
indicators for business processes and concepts on how to measure them.
In addition to these extensions of the book, there are many minor changes,
which, I hope, will increase its readability and soundness. Quite a number of
them were triggered by readers, whose feedback I am happy to acknowledge.
Thanks to all members of my research group at HPI; your comments and
remarks on earlier versions of this manuscript have helped improving the book.
Special thanks to Matthias Kunze and Alexander Lübbe for their feedback,
mainly on the BPMN sections. I would also like to thank the Berliner BPM
Offensive for providing me with the stencil set of the BPMN shapes. The
shapes are much nicer than I could ever do them, they helped a lot!

Potsdam, March 2012 M.W.

Preface

The extensive ground covered by business process management is divided

between representatives from two communities: business administration and
computer science. Due to the increasingly important role of information sys-
tems in the realization of business processes, a common understanding of and
productive interaction between these communities are essential.
Due to different viewpoints, however, the interaction between these com-
munities is seldom seamless. Business administration professionals tend to
consider information technology as a subordinate aspect in business process
management that experts will take care of. On the other hand, computer sci-
ence professionals often consider business goals and organizational regulations
as terms that do not deserve much thought, but require the appropriate level
of abstraction.
This book argues that we need to have a common understanding of the
different aspects of business process management addressed by all communi-
ties involved. Robust and correct realization of business processes in software
that increases customer satisfaction and ultimately contributes to the com-
petitive advantage of an enterprise can only be achieved through productive
communication between these communities.
By structuring business process management, this book aims at providing
a step towards a better understanding of the concepts involved in business
process management—from the perspective of a computer scientist.
If business persons find the book too technical, software people find it too
non-technical, and formal persons find it too imprecise, but all of them have
a better understanding of the ground covered by our discipline, this book has
achieved its goal.

The Web site bpm-book.com contains additional information related to this

book, such as links to references that are available online and exercises that
facilitate the reader’s getting into deeper contact with the topics addressed.
Teaching material is also available at that Web site.

XIII
XIV Preface

This book is based on material used in the business process management lec-
tures that the author has conducted in the Master’s and Bachelor’s program
in IT Systems Engineering at the Hasso Plattner Institute for IT Systems En-
gineering at the University of Potsdam. I am thankful for the critical remarks
by my students, who encouraged me to shape the content of my lectures,
which ultimately led to this book.
Many people contributed to this book. First of all, I like to thank my col-
league researchers in business process management for developing this area
in recent years, most prominently Wil van der Aalst, Alistair Barros, Mar-
lon Dumas, Arthur ter Hofstede, Axel Martens, and Manfred Reichert. The
chapter on case handling is based on joint work with Wil van der Aalst and
Dolf Grünbauer. I am grateful to Barbara Weber for her detailled comments
on the manuscript that have led to improvements, mainly in the chapter on
process orchestrations.
I acknowledge the support of the members of my research group at Hasso
Plattner Institute. Gero Decker, Frank Puhlmann, and Hilmar Schuschel were
involved in the preparation of the assignments of the business process man-
agement lectures. Together with Dominik Kuropka and Harald Meyer, they
provided valuable comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. Special
thanks to Gero Decker for contributing the first version of the process chore-
ographies chapter.
The lion’s share of my acknowledgements goes to my family, and foremost
to Daniela.

Potsdam, July 2007 M.W.

Contents

Part I Foundation

1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.1 Motivation and Definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.2 Business Process Lifecycle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1.3 Classification of Business Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
1.4 Structure, and Organization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

2 Evolution of Enterprise Systems Architectures . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

2.1 Traditional Application Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
2.2 Enterprise Applications and their Integration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
2.3 Enterprise Modelling and Process Orientation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
2.4 Workflow Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
2.5 Enterprise Services Computing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
2.6 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Bibliographical Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

Part II Business Process Modelling

3 Business Process Modelling Foundation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

3.1 Conceptual Model and Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
3.2 Abstraction Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
3.3 From Business Functions to Business Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
3.4 Activity Models and Activity Instances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
3.5 Process Models and Process Instances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
3.6 Process Interactions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
3.7 Further Modelling Dimensions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
3.8 Business Process Flexibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
3.9 Architecture of Process Execution Environments . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
Bibliographical Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

XV
XVI Contents

4 Process Orchestrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123

4.1 Control Flow Patterns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
4.2 Petri Nets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
4.3 Event-driven Process Chains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
4.4 Workflow Nets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
4.5 Yet Another Workflow Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
4.6 Graph-Based Workflow Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198
4.7 Business Process Model and Notation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204
Bibliographical Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239

5 Business Decision Modelling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241

5.1 Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
5.2 Decision Model and Notation Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244
5.3 Decision Tables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249
5.4 Hit Policies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252
Bibliographical Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257

6 Process Choreographies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259

6.1 Motivation and Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260
6.2 Development Phases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263
6.3 Process Choreography Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265
6.4 Process Choreography Implementation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 276
6.5 Service Interaction Patterns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283
6.6 Let’s Dance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291
6.7 Choreography Modelling in BPMN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295
Bibliographical Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305

7 Properties of Business Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307

7.1 Data Dependencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 308
7.2 Object Lifecycle Conformance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 310
7.3 Structural Soundness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313
7.4 Soundness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314
7.5 Relaxed Soundness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 322
7.6 Further Soundness Criteria . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327
7.7 Decision Soundness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 342
Bibliographical Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347

Part III Architectures and Methodologies

8 Business Process Management Architectures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351

8.1 Workflow Management Architectures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351
8.2 Web Services and their Composition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 356
8.3 Advanced Service Composition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 365
8.4 Data-Driven Processes: Case Handling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 374
 Contents XVII

Bibliographical Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 382

9 Business Process Management Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 385

9.1 Dependencies between Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 385
9.2 Methodology Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 388
9.3 Phases in Detail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 390
Bibliographical Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 399

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 401

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 413