xoEPC - Jan Mendling

3.5. EPCs and other Process Modeling Languages 97
thesis, and visualization of process models and state spaces. This way, researchers can
easily benefit from the EPC semantics and analyze its relationship to other formalisms.
3.5 EPCs and other Process Modeling Languages
In this section, we provide a comparison of EPCs with other business process model-
ing languages. The selection includes Workflow nets [Aal97], UML Activity Diagrams
(UML AD) [OMG04], BPMN [OMG06], and YAWL [AH05], and is meant to illus-
trate differences and commonalities without going into mapping details. We first discuss
whether these other process modeling languages offer elements similar to the different
EPC connectors. After that, we utilize the workflow patterns documented in [AHKB03]
to compare the languages. BPEL [CGK + 02, ACD + 03, AAB + 05], which is also receiving
increasing attention as a standard, is not included here since it addresses the execution
rather than the conceptual modeling of processes. For further details on the relationship
between EPCs and BPEL, refer to [MZ05a, ZM05, MZ05b, MLZ05, MLZ06b, MLZ06a].
For a workflow pattern analysis of BPEL, see [WADH03]. Furthermore, the XPDL stan-
dard [Wor02, Wor05] has also gained some support in the industry for the definition
of executable workflow process. A workflow pattern analysis of XPDL is reported in
[Aal03]. Other approaches for comparing process modeling languages are reported in
[SAJ + 02, RG02, BKKR03, Mue04, LK06].
3.5.1 Comparison based on Routing Elements
The six different connectors of EPCs, i.e., XOR-split and XOR-join, AND-split and
AND-join, OR-split and OR-join, provide the means to model complex routing and or-
dering between activities of a business process. Table 3.4 takes these routing elements
as a benchmark to compare EPCs with other business process modeling languages. It
shows that the behavioral semantics of XOR-connectors and AND-connectors, as well
as OR-split connectors, can be represented in all the considered languages. In Work-
flow nets XOR-connectors and AND-connectors are captured by places and transitions
with multiple input and output arcs, respectively. OR-split behavior can be specified as