Approaches to modeling business processes: a critical analysis of BPMN, workflow patterns and YAWL

We investigate three approaches describing models of business processes: the OMG standard BPMN in its recent version 2.0, the workflow patterns of the Workflow Pattern Initiative and their reference implementation YAWL. We show how the three approaches fail to provide practitioners with a suitable means precisely and faithfully to capture business scenarios and to analyze, communicate and manage the resulting models. On the positive side, we distill from the discussion six criteria which can help to recognize practical and reliable tool-supported business process description and modeling systems.