What is a Process Model Composed of? A Systematic Literature Review of Meta-Models in BPM
This review provides a consolidated understanding of business process meta-models for researchers and practitioners in Business Process Management (BPM) by mapping existing approaches and their components.
This paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR) of business process meta-models, aiming to identify the types of meta-models, their recurring constructs, purposes, and evaluations. The study consolidates knowledge on what state-of-the-art literature considers relevant for describing business processes.
Business process modelling languages typically enable the representation of business process models by employing (graphical) symbols. These symbols can vary depending upon the verbosity of the language, the modelling paradigm, the focus of the language, and so on. To make explicit the different constructs and rules employed by a specific language, as well as bridge the gap across different languages, meta-models have been proposed in literature. These meta-models are a crucial source of knowledge on what state-of-the-art literature considers relevant to describe business processes. The goal of this work is to provide an extensive systematic literature review (SLR) of business process meta-models. This SLR aims at answering research questions concerning: (i) the kind of meta-models proposed in literature; (ii) the recurring constructs they contain; (iii) their purposes; and (iv) their evaluations.