Modeling structured and unstructured processes: An empirical evaluation

Abstract

Imperative process languages, such as BPMN, describe business processes in terms of collections of activities and control flows among them. Despite their popularity, such languages remain useful mostly for structured processes whose flow of activities is well-known and does not vary greatly. For unstructured processes, on the other hand, the verdict is still out as to the best way to represent them. In our previous work, we have proposed Azzurra, a specification language for business processes founded on social concepts, such as roles, agents and commitments. In this paper, we present the results of an experiment that comparatively evaluates Azzurra and BPMN in terms of their ability to represent structured and unstructured processes. Our results suggest that Azzurra is better suited than BPMN for unstructured business processes.