Declarative versus imperative process modeling languages: The issue of maintainability

Abstract

The rise of interest in declarative languages for process modeling both justifies and demands empirical investigations into their presumed advantages over more traditional, imperative alternatives. Our concern in this paper is with the ease of maintaining business process models, for example due to changing performance or conformance demands. We aim to contribute to a rigorous, theoretical discussion of this topic by drawing a link to well-established research on maintainability of information artifacts. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.