Foundations of Business Process Modeling

This chapter provides an overview of business process management and business process modeling. We approach business process management by giving a historical classification of seminal work, and define it by the help of the business process management life cycle. Business process models play an important role in this life cycle, in particular, if information systems are used for executing processes. We deduct a definition for business process modeling based on a discussion of modeling from a general information systems point of view. In the following, we detail business process modeling techniques, in particular, modeling languages and modeling procedures for business process modeling. Finally, we discuss some future trends with a focus on the business process execution language for Web services (BPEL), and conclude the chapter with a summary. The chapter aims to cover business process modeling in a comprehensive way such that academics and practitioners can use it as a reference for identifying more specialized works.