Event-Driven Process Chains (EPC)

Abstract

This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of Event-driven Process Chains (EPCs) and introduces a novel definition of EPC semantics. EPCs became popular in the 1990s as a conceptual business process modeling language in the context of reference modeling. Reference modeling refers to the documentation of generic business operations in a model such as service processes in the telecommunications sector, for example. It is claimed that reference models can be reused and adapted as best-practice recommendations in individual companies (see [230, 168, 229, 131, 400, 401, 446, 127, 362, 126]). The roots of reference modeling can be traced back to the Kölner Integrationsmodell (KIM) [146, 147] that was developed in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1990s, the Institute of Information Systems (IWi) in Saarbrücken worked on a project with SAP to define a suitable business process modeling language to document the processes of the SAP R/3 enterprise resource planning system. There were two results from this joint effort: the definition of EPCs [210] and the documentation of the SAP system in the SAP Reference Model (see [92, 211]). The extensive database of this reference model contains almost 10,000 sub-models: 604 of them non-trivial EPC business process models. The SAP Reference model had a huge impact with several researchers referring to it in their publications (see [473, 235, 127, 362, 281, 427, 415]) as well as motivating the creation of EPC reference models in further domains including computer integrated manufacturing [377, 379], logistics [229] or retail [52]. The wide-spread application of EPCs in business process modeling theory and practice is supported by their coverage in seminal text books for business process management and information systems in general (see [378, 380, 49, 384, 167, 240]). EPCs are frequently used in practice due to a high user acceptance [376] and extensive tool support. Some examples of tools that support EPCs are ARIS Toolset by IDS Scheer AG, AENEIS by ATOSS Software AG, ADONIS by BOC GmbH, Visio by Microsoft Corp., Nautilus by Gedilan Consulting GmbH, and Bonapart by Pikos GmbH. In order to facilitate the interchange of EPC business process models between these tools, there is a tool neutral interchange format called EPC Markup Language (EPML) [283, 285, 286, 287, 289, 290, 291].The remainder of this chapter is structured as follows: Section 2.1 gives a brief, informal description of EPC syntax and semantics and introduces the notation by the help of an example. Section 2.2 discusses several approaches to EPC syntax formalization and consolidates them in one definition. Section 2.3 presents various extensions that were proposed for EPCs. Section 2.4 covers different approaches to formal semantics of EPCs and introduces the semantics definition that is used later in this book. A respective implementation of these semantics in ProM is also described. Finally in Section 2.5, EPCs are compared to other business process modeling languages. The chapter concludes with a summary in Section 2.6.KeywordsTransition RelationNegative TokenReachability GraphProcess InterfaceLoan ContractThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.