Business process model repositories - Framework and survey

Large organizations often run hundreds or even thousands of business processes. Managing such large collections of business processes is a challenging task. Intelligent software can assist in that task by providing common repository functions such as storage, search and version management. They can also provide advanced functions that are specific for managing collections of process models, such as managing the consistency of public and private processes and extracting knowledge from existing processes to better design new processes. This paper presents a framework for repositories that assist in managing large collections of business process models, It also presents a survey of the functionality that existing repositories provide. The framework consists of a management model and a reference architecture. The management model lists the functionality that can be provided. The reference architecture presents the components that provide this functionality and their interconnections. The survey presents an overview of existing repositories and the functionality from the framework that they provide. By presenting a framework and a survey, this paper is a basis for a future research agenda. From the survey, we conclude that the field of Business Process Model Repositories is an important and active field in research and practice, but that complete repositories are not yet available and that existing repositories focus on traditional functionality rather than exploiting the full potential of information management tools.