BPMN: How much does it cost? An incremental approach

Abstract

In this paper we propose some extensions of the business process modeling notation (BPMN) to be able to evaluate the overall cost of business process diagrams. The BPMN is very expressive, and a general treatment of this problem is very complex. Therefore, it seems reasonable to define classes of business process diagrams capturing real processes and to develop efficient analysis methods for these classes. In the paper we define some relevant subsets of the BPMN, extend them with the concept of cost, and provide computational models for each class, in most cases reducing them to existing problems for which efficient solutions already exist. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.