The temporal perspective in business process modeling: a survey and research challenges

One key perspective when dealing with business process management is time. All business experts agree upon the fact that time is a key resource for processes within organisations. Indeed, time managing is an effective cost reduction strategy and thus ensures profit maximization for organisations. As a result, business managers, researchers, and academicians in management are striving to have full-support of temporal aspects in current business process management suites. Consequently, modeling and managing temporal requirements in the business process field is becoming a topic of intensive research. This paper presents a survey of the existing approaches to specifying and verifying the temporal perspective in business processes. Furthermore, this paper provides a critical and comparative analysis of the studied approaches and stands out major challenges to be addressed to substantially enhance the time management in the business process management field.