xoEPC - Jan Mendling

10 1. Introduction
implementations of these methods (i.e. instantiations) as a plug-in for ProM and as
a software component called xoEPC in order to demonstrate feasibility.
Guideline 2: Problem Relevance Relevance of information systems research is consti-
tuted by addressing a problem of development or practical application of informa-
tion systems; and in particular, their planning, management, design, operation, and
evaluation [HMPR04]. The general business need of this research stems from a
wide-spread application of business process management in practice, and of EPCs
as a modeling language in particular. The findings and concepts presented in this
thesis contribute to several aspects of quality assurance in business process model-
ing.
Guideline 3: Design Evaluation The utility of an artifact in a given problem situation
must be clearly established using evaluation methods [HMPR04]. The complete-
ness and the correctness of the EPC semantics definition and the soundness analy-
sis is checked using analytical methods. The usefulness of business process model
metrics is first evaluated in a descriptive way before using statistical methods. The
implementations of the verification methods were extensively tested with numerous
EPC models.
Guideline 4: Research Contribution The design research has to provide a novel, sig-
nificant, and general contribution to the knowledge base; otherwise it has to be
considered as design routine [HMPR04]. The contributions have already been pre-
sented in Section 1.2. They include a novel formalization of the OR-join (design
science), two verification approaches for process models with OR-joins and mul-
tiple start and end events (design science), metrics for business process models
(design science), and a validation of the metrics as predictors of error probability
using an extensive set of EPC business process models from practice (behavioral
science).
Guideline 5: Research Rigor Rigor refers to the way in which construction and eval-
uation of design science is conducted. This implies that the researcher has to ef-
fectively make use of the knowledge base and its methodologies and foundations
[HMPR04]. For this thesis, we took advantage of prior research on business pro-