Business Process Complexity Measurement: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Business process complexity is an important factor that affects process quality and has a significant impact on the maintenance, optimization, and execution efficiency of processes. To review the application progress and trends of process complexity measurement in business process management, this study uses the systematic literature review (SLR) method to qualitatively and quantitatively analyze the theoretical background, rationality, effectiveness, and comprehensiveness of 92 process complexity metrics. The findings showed that the measurement of process complexity primarily encompasses four dimensions: activity complexity, control-flow complexity, data-flow complexity, and resource complexity. However, most metrics consider only one or two aspects of complexity in the process and rely mainly on empirical validation, thus lacking theoretical validation support. Currently, the most popular and widely used complexity metric is Control Flow Complexity (CFC). Process complexity metrics mainly focus on measuring the complexity of process models, and the majority of them focus on activity complexity or control-flow complexity. The future research trend is to combine data mining techniques with process log data to analyze process complexity.