Visual Modeling of Instance-Spanning Constraints in Process-Aware Information Systems

Instance-Spanning Constraints (ISCs) have raised attention just recently although they are omnipresent in practice to define conditions across multiple instances or processes, e.g., bundling of cargo. It would be crucial to convey ISC information on, e.g., shared instance resources to users. However, no approach for visualizing ISCs has been presented yet. To overcome this gap we analysed literature and derived visualization requirements for constraints on multiple instances of the same or different processes. The proposed language ISC Viz is based on BPMN-Q and incorporates existing visual notations to reduce the cognitive load on the user. The applicability of ISC Viz is shown along 114 ISC modeling examples. Moreover, a questionnaire-based study with 42 participants is conducted in order to assess the usability of ISC Viz.