Business Process Architecture: Use and Correctness

Becoming more and more process oriented, companies develop collections of hundreds or even thousands of business process models that represent the complex system of cooperating entities that form an organization. Designing and analyzing the structure of this system of business process models emerges as a new challenge, which is covered by the field of business process architecture. This paper presents a formal conceptual framework for representing and analyzing business process architectures. It identifies patterns of relations between process models, and it introduces anti-patterns that represent erroneous relations between them. The conceptual framework and the patterns are evaluated using a real-world process model collection. The evaluation shows that explicitly representing and analyzing relations between process models can help improving the correctness and consistency of the business process architecture as a whole.