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The purpose of this paper is to provide a model for semantically annotating business process models stored in a repository. The purpose of the model is to facilitate the searching of process models, to support navigating the process model repository and to enhance the understandability of process models.

The annotation model has been developed by following a design science research approach. By analysing existing works the authors have identified the requirements for such an annotation model. Following these requirements the authors have designed a context‐based process semantic annotation model. As a proof of concept, the annotation model has been implemented in a repository prototype and its applicability demonstrated. Finally, the annotation model has been evaluated in two controlled experimental studies.

The proposed annotation model can be used to positively affect searching, navigation and understandability of process models.

Application of the annotation model and clearly defined concepts in the process model repository is expected to improve the process of finding relevant process models in the repository for reuse.

The contribution of the paper is both theoretical and practical. It provides a clear‐cut context‐based process semantic annotation model that can be implemented easily in any process model repository.

This paper aims to present the Modelery, a platform for collaborative repository to support model-based software development. The Modelery is a Web platform, composed both by a Web page and Web services for interoperability.

By performing a study in the existing platforms, it was possible to achieve a set of issues to tackle. The issues enabled the possibility to define a set of requirements that allowed the authors to design a new platform, and to perform a model-driven software development process, which started from the requirements until reaching the final software solution.

With this work, it was possible to perform a survey on the currently available artifacts repositories, categorize them and identify their shortcomings. This was essential to define the set of requirements for a new platform to overcome the identified issues. This process leads to a platform able to improve the currently available solutions, and validated in the scientific community. In this paper, the authors also explore the applications of the repository. First, they use the Modelery to replace an older model’s repository. Second, they have enabled the communication between other tools and the Modelery via Web services.

This work presents a new Web repository for software artifacts aimed at supporting researchers and software developers. The presented platform is an improvement over other platforms on the integration of artifacts repository, social functionalities and scientific publications integration. The authors conclude this paper by comparing the achieved platform in terms of functionalities, against the other analyzed platforms.

Identifying handovers is an important but difficult to achieve goal for companies as handovers have advantages allowing for specialisation in processes as well as disadvantages by creating erroneous interfaces.

Conceptualisation of a method based on theory and evaluation with company data using a process model repository.

The method allows to evaluate handovers from the perspective of roles in processes and grouping of employees in organisational units. It uses existing process model repositories connected with organisational chart information in companies to determine the density of handovers. The method is successfully evaluated using the example of a major telecommunications company with 1,010 process models in its repository.

Companies can determine on various levels, up to the overall organisational level, in which parts of the company efforts are best spent to manage handovers in an optimal way.

This paper is first in showing how handovers can be conceptualised and identified with a large-scale method.

Business process has become the core assets of many organizations and it becomes increasing common for most medium to large organizations to have collections of hundreds or even thousands of business process models. The purpose of this paper is to explore an alternative dimension to process mining in which the objective is to extract process constraints (or business rules) as opposed to business process models. It also focusses on an alternative data set – process models as opposed to process instances (i.e. event logs).

The authors present a new method of knowledge discovery to find business activity sequential patterns embedded in process model repositories. The extracted sequential patterns are considered as business rules.

The authors find significant knowledge hidden in business processes model repositories. The hidden knowledge is considered as business rules. The business rules extracted from process models are significant and valid sequential correlations among business activities belonging to a particular organization. Such business rules represent business constraints that have been encoded in business process models. Experimental results have indicated the effectiveness and accuracy of the approach in extracting business rules from repositories of business process models.

This research will assist organizations to extract business rules from their existing business process models. The discovered business rules are very important for any organization, where rules can be used to help organizations better achieve goals, remove obstacles to market growth, reduce costly mistakes, improve communication, comply with legal requirements, and increase customer loyalty.

There has very been little work in mining business process models as opposed to an increasing number of very large collections of business process models. This work has filled this gap with the focus on extracting business rules.

Business process models, while primarily intended for process documentation, communication, and improvement, are often also used as input for developing process-oriented software systems (Ouyang et al., 2009). Ensuring correctness, handling complexity, and improving reusability and maintainability of business process models are important for all these goals. The purpose of this paper is to propose an aspect-oriented business process modeling and correctness controlling method based on Petri nets to satisfy these goals.

The aspect-oriented paradigm provides a proper mechanism to modularization, and thus reduces the complexity of models, and also improves reusability and maintainability. However, weaving aspects into base processes may bring in mistakes or errors. To ensure correctness of modeling, this paper presents a formal approach to modeling aspect-oriented business processes and a method to ensure modeling correctness. Petri net is used as the process modeling language and its analysis techniques are applied to analyze the correctness of modeling. Two types of correctness, specifically, aspect-aspect correctness and base-aspect correctness are analyzed. A real banking process model is studied systematically in the case study to evaluate the approach and the performance assessments are conducted to show the cost and effect of the approach.

Designing aspect-oriented business process models help organizations reusing the model elements to reduce redundancy of their model repository, improving their maintainability, and supporting them to adapt to the changes of business requirements with flexible modeling. It is important to stress that the correctness of business process modeling is important in ensuring the quality of the models, especially in the safety-critical business domains, such as financial business domain.

In this paper, separation of concerns is used to separate the cross-cutting activities and core activities in accordance with the different functions of these activities, and an approach to modeling aspect-oriented business processes is proposed. First, the cross-cutting activities are encapsulated as aspects, while core business activities are modeled as base processes. Then, according to the correctness requirements of business process models, based on the weaving mechanisms of aspect-oriented approach, weaving correctness is defined. Weaving correctness controlling methods between multi-aspects and between aspects and base processes are designed. Errors or mistakes of aspect-oriented business process modeling are prevented during the procedure of modeling to ensure error-free business process modeling.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the current state of the research field of business process architecture (BPA) and its design methodologies.

A systematic literature review (SLR) was conducted using meta- and content-based perspectives.

From over 6,000 candidate studies, 89 were selected. A fifth of these primary works corresponded to BPA design methodologies. Though the BPA research field remains in an early stage of development, it bears promising growth potential. Regarding BPA design methodologies, the following aspects susceptible for further research were detected: identification and modeling of business process relationships; specification of inputs; standardization of models, notations and tool support; consideration of managerial concerns; integration of knowledge from other areas; and validation of methodological and product quality aspects.

The main limitation of the work lies in not being fully reproducible due to the fixed number of data sources and their digital nature, together with subjective decisions in work selection, data extraction and data analysis.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge no study has yet analyzed the BPA research field by means of an SLR. This study will benefit practitioners and research groups working on this topic by allowing them to get a rigorous overview of the BPA research field with an emphasis on available BPA design methodologies, and become aware of research gaps within the BPA field to position further research.

Although software systems used to automate business processes have been becoming rather advanced, the existing practice of developing and modifying graphical process models in those software systems is still primitive: users have to manually add, change, or delete each node and arc piece by piece. Since such manual operations are typically tedious, time‐consuming, and prone to errors, it is desirable to develop an alternative approach. This paper aims to address this issue.

In this paper, a novel, human‐understandable process manipulation language (PML) for specifying operations (e.g. insertion, deletion, merging, and split) on process models is developed. A prototype system to demonstrate PML is also developed.

The paper finds that manipulation operations on process models can be standardized and, thus, can be facilitated and automated through using a structured language like PML.

PML can improve manipulation operations on process models over the existing manual approach in two aspects: first, using PML, users only need to specify what operations are to be performed on process models, and then a computer carries out specified operations as well as performs other routine operations (e.g. generating nodes and arcs). This feature minimizes user effort to deal with low‐level details on nodes and arcs. Second, using PML, users can systematically specify operations on process models, thus reducing arbitrary operations and problems in process models.

The study proposes competence models for the roles of process owners, process analysts and industrial engineers based on qualitative research.

The research methodology is a combination of a questionnaire survey and interviewing in Czech companies, which develop the process approach. The proposed competence models can be utilized during business process management (BPM) implementation while appointing process owners, analysts and industrial engineers and their further development.

This paper emphasizes the role of human factor and presents research results concerning most important BPM roles and their competencies.

There is lack of research (a research gap) in the field of BPM roles, what they do and what they should do.

A system of competence models is thus a tool for human resource management and should increase the success rate of BPM projects. Another possible utilization is in higher education in business administration.

Another possible utilization is in higher education in business administration.

It proposes competence models for the roles of process owners, process analysts and industrial engineers based on qualitative research.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the state of the art of social business process management (Social BPM), explaining applied approaches, existing tools and challenges and to propose a research agenda for encouraging further development of the area.

The methodology comprises a qualitative analysis using secondary data. The approach relies on searches of scientific papers conducted in well-known databases, identifying research work related to Social BPM solutions and those contributing with social characteristics to BPM. Based on the identified papers, the authors selected the most relevant and the latest publications, and categorized their contributions and findings based on open and selective coding. In total, the analysis is based on 51 papers that were selected and analyzed in depth.

Main results show that there are several studies investigating modeling approaches for socializing process activities and for capturing implicit knowledge possessed and used by process actors, enabling to add some kind of flexibility to business processes. However, despite the proven interest in the area, there are not yet adequate tools providing effective solutions for Social BPM. Based on our findings, the authors propose a research agenda comprising three main lines: contributions of social software (SS) to Social BPM, Social BPM as a mechanism for adding flexibility to and for discovering new business processes and Social BPM for enhancing business processes with the use of new technologies. The authors also identify relevant problems for each line.

Some SS tools, like wikis, enable managing social aspects in executing business processes and can be used to coordinate simple business processes. Despite they are commonly used, they are not yet mature tools supporting Social BPM and more efficient tools are yet to appear. The lack of tools preclude organizations from benefitting from implicit knowledge owned by and shared among business process actors, which could contribute to better-informed decisions related to organizational processes. In addition, more research is needed for considering Social BPM as an approach for organizations to benefit from the adoption of new technologies in their business processes.

The paper assesses the state of the art in Social BPM, an incipient area in research and practice. The area can be defined as the intersection of two bigger areas highly relevant for organizations; on the one hand, the management and execution of business processes; and on the other hand, the use of social software, including social media tools, for leveraging on implicit knowledge shared by business process actors to improving efficiency of business processes.

The complexity of business environments often causes organizations to produce several inconsistent views of the same business process (BP), leading to fragmentation. BP view integration attempts to produce an integrated view from different views of the same model, facilitating the management of BP models.

To study the trends of BP view integration, the authors conduct an extensive and systematic literature review to summarize findings since the 1970s. With a starting corpus of 918 documents, this survey draws up a systematic inventory of solutions used in academia and industry. By narrowing it down to 71 articles, the authors discuss in-depth 17 BP integration techniques papers, classifying each solution according to 9 criteria.

The authors' study shows that most view-integration methods (11) utilize annotation-based matching, based on formal merging rules. While most solutions are formalized, only approximately half are validated with a real-world use case scenario. View integration can be applied to areas other than database schema integration and BP view integration.

By summarizing existing knowledge up to June 2021, the authors explore possible future research directions. The authors highlight the application of view integration to the blockchain research area, where stakeholders can have different views on the same blockchain. The authors expect that this study contributes to interdisciplinary research across view integration, namely to the context of blockchain.

This survey serves to pave the way for future trends, where the authors highlight the application of view integration to blockchain research.