Towards guidelines of modeling for ecology-aware process design

Abstract

During the last couple of years, the ecological impact of manufacturing and logistical processes gained importance. Many global players, including Walmart, Kellogg’s and L’Oréal, oblige their suppliers to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions in their operations. Contrary to this development, traditional process models are mostly compiled using entities, roles, or resources that are relevant for a mere economical description of a business process. To account for the rising importance of ecological matters, with this work in progress paper we provide ecology-oriented Guidelines of Modeling (EGoM). These design principles allow to compile process models, that can be assessed and optimized in terms of their ecological footprint. The principles are tested through the application of a technique for compliance checking, where we implement a search algorithm for ecological weakness patterns in process models to the BPM software ARIS. The results indicate that the Guidelines foster the application of Green BPM methods that help achieving ecology-friendly process design.