Approaches combining methods of Operational Research with Business Process Model and Notation: A systematic review

Business process modelling

Today, process modelling and business process management (BPMN) have a significant impact. Process modelling is currently a mainly graphical representation of processes, e.g. in what order particular activities should be implemented and what inputs and outputs the processes require for proper functioning. The primary goal of process modelling is to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the entire process as well as partial activities. Many business process modelling techniques have been proposed over the last decades, so the article Recker et al. (2009) comparatively assesses representational analyses of 12 popular process modelling techniques to provide insights into the extent to which they differ from each other. The review business process modelling literature and describe the leading process modelling techniques falling to and before 2004 are published in the articl Aguilar-Saven (2004). The topic of visualization of business process model has been investigated in publication Dani, Freitas & Thom (2019), where the authors performed a systematic literature review of the topic “visualization of business process models”. Kalogirou (2003) is a particularly fascinating article that illustrates how AI techniques might play an essential role in the modelling and prediction of the performance and control of the combustion process. Although BPM initially focused mainly on the industrial, service and business sectors, it has also appeared in other sectors in recent years. The popularity of BPMN has been confirmed by articles such as Zarour et al. (2019), which presents the current state-of-the-art of BPN extensions. Publication De Ramon Fernandez, Ruiz Fernandez & Sabuco Garcia (2019) deals with the optimization of clinical processes.

Operational Reserach

Operational Research (OR) is the well-known approach of using analytical and advanced methods to help make the best possible decisions. As early as 1980, Article by authors Shannon, Long & Buckles (1980) presented the results of a survey of the perception of the usefulness and knowledge of the 12 OR methodologies commonly used in the practice of industrial engineering. The article by Dubey (2010) defines the relationship between OR and another branch of sciences. The article Gu, Goetschalckx & McGinnis (2010) presents a detailed survey of the research on warehouse design, performance evaluation, practical case studies, and computational support tools. The article Negahban & Smith (2014) provided a review of discrete event simulation publications with a particular focus on applications in manufacturing.

OR methods are often associated with new technologies. In article Sarac, Absi & Dauzère-Pérès (2010), a state-of-the-art on RFID technology deployments in supply chains was given to analyze the impact on the supply chain performance. Xu, Wang & Newman (2011), in their article, tries to identify future trends of computer-aided process planning (CAPP). Dynamic ride-share systems is investigated in the article Agatz et al. (2012).

Eligibility criteria

This study included publications listed in the Web Of Science (WOS) database of Clarivate Analytics that were published between 1 January 2004 and 18 May 2020. The year 2004 was selected as this is when BPMN was created by BPMI.

Exclusion criteria (EC) are:

• EC1 = The publication was published in a language other than English.

• EC2 = The full text of the publications was not available.

• EC3 = The publication did not coincide with the topic of systematic research.

• EC4 = BPMN was used only as a presentation tool and not as part of the research.

Information sources and search

The primary source of information for the study was the database Web Of Science (WOS) of Clarivate Analytics. An advanced search was performed for the search query mentiones below. The search was performed in the Topics (TS) section.

Especially, the CORE database with the indexes listed in Table 1 was selected. The search was performed for ‘All document types,’ ‘All languages’ and the years 2004–2020.

Study selection

The first step of the review process involved title and abstract screening, followed by a full-text review of the remaining articles. Two independent assessors verified the results of the title and abstract screening and the full-text review. One assessed the suitability of the results from the perspective of OR and the other from an IT perspective, i.e. whether it was BPMN notation and its use. Articles were included if they met all the following criteria: (i) they used an OR method, (ii) a BPMN model was used and (iii) the complete text was available in English (abstracts, commentaries, letters and unpublished data were excluded). Studies were not excluded based on their methodological quality.

The selected publications were examined from many perspectives, and each contribution was coded according to different criteria. This study aimed to enhance the discipline’s fundamental progress in understanding the link between OR methods and BPMN. The results of this study could encourage scientists to use OR methods for process analysis.

A limitation of this review was restricting the included articles to English-language publications that looked at process analysis using OR and BPMN published between 1 January 2004 and 18 May 2020. Relevant studies in other languages or published after 18 May 2020 may have been omitted.

Data collection process

Data was collected based on keywords selected from the article Lane, Mansour & Harpell (1993), which analyzed the quantitative techniques of Operation Research. From this document, the 18 Operation Research methods were selected and listed in the Table 2.

The results were further categorized as to whether they corresponded to the given keywords and their meaning. The main results of the systematic literature review were obtained by analyzing by the two main guidelines of PRISMA: Moher et al. (2009) and MECIR: Higgins et al. (2018).

Synthesis of results

The individual studies were subjected to bibliometric analysis and then the studies were assessed according to the content and methods used. The bibliometric analysis describes and analyses up to date research. It aims at summarizing the latest progress in the field by quantitatively investigating the literature. This method provides a vast canvas of knowledge from the micro-level (institutes, researchers, and campuses) to the macro-level (countries and continents) Mryglod et al. (2013). Frequency analysis was used to find the most common scientific areas, the countries with the most publications and the most common keywords. Science mapping was performing using the VOS viewer, Venn diagrams and bar and bubble graphs, Van Eck et al. (2010), Cobo et al. (2011).

The Venn/Euler diagram graphically represents the relationships of the largest set of keywords. Euler diagrams are considered to be an effective means of visualizing containment, intersection, and exclusion. The goal of this type of graph is to communicate scientific results visually. Leonhard Euler first popularized the principle of labeled closed curves in the article Euler (1775) Alternative names for Euler diagrams include ‘Euler circles.’ They can also be incorrectly called Venn diagrams. Venn diagrams require all possible curve intersections to be present, so can be seen as a subset of Euler diagrams, that is, every Venn diagram is a Euler diagram, but not every Euler diagram is a Venn diagram. John Venn introduced Venn diagrams a hundred years after Euler in the article Venn (1880). Venn diagram is a schematic graph used in logic theory to depict collections of sets and represent their relationships.

Categorization of publications based on the clarivate analytics

Journals and books covered by the Web of Science Core Collection were assigned to at least one Web of Science category. Each Web of Science category was mapped to one research area Clarivate Analytics (2019). The research areas for the selected publications were:

• COMPUTER SCIENCE (CS)

• ENGINEERING (En)

• OPERATIONAL RESEARCH MANAGEMENT SCIENCE (OR)

• BUSINESS ECONOMICS (BE)

• ROBOTICS (Ro)

• AUTOMATION CONTROL SYSTEMS (ACS)

• TELECOMMUNICATIONS (Te)

• TRANSPORTATION (Tr)

We selected four main groups, for which we compiled a bar graph and a Venn diagram after analysis. We chose the number of four research areas for representation in the Venn diagram; four sets are still well arranged. Another argument was the number of publications in other areas, where the set "ROBOTICS" contains two documents and the sets ‘AUTOMATION CONTROL SYSTEMS,’ ‘TELECOMMUNICATIONS’ and ‘TRANSPORTATION’ each one document.

Bar graph on Fig. 2 is based on frequency analysis and contains the total number of publications in a given research area, their average number of citations, and the corresponding average number of pages per article. The graph shows the results by type of purpose. The first part shows the frequency of documents for each research areas. The second part focuses on the average number of citations, and the third shows the average number of pages per article.

The Venn diagram, in Fig. 3, shows selected four research areas as sets, including their intersection areas. In a specific area, we also stated the relevant number of documents and their average number of citations.

This part of the bibliometric analysis showed us the answer to the research question R2. Although BPMN was explicitly designed for corporate analysis and economic analysis, and Operational Research focuses primarily on addressing managerial decisions, most publications were not in the field of business economics (BE). Surprisingly, this area actually has the fewest publications. The field of computer science had the most papers, and papers in the field of OR had the most citations. The field of BE had the most extended publications, however, i.e. the average number of pages per paper.

Result1: Research question R2—not confirmed.

Year of publication

Figure 4 illustrates the distribution over time of the selected publications with BPMN milestones. The BPMN versions adoption dates, taken from OMG.org (2018), complements this figure.

The different BPMN versions brought more or fewer changes in notation. While the changes between BPMN 1.0 and BPMN 1.2 were rather consmetics, e.g. renaming ‘Rule’ elements to ‘Conditional’ or slight increasing the number of elements from 48 to 55. The arrival of BPMN 2.0 was a major breakthrough and represented the largest revision of BPMN since its inception. In this version, it is possible to create a new ‘Choreography model,’ ‘Collaborations model’ and ‘Conversation model’ in BPMN in addition to collaborative processes and internal (private) business processes. Events are now divided into ‘interrupted’ and ‘non-interrupted’ and ‘catching’ and ‘throwing.’ The message type is newly introduced, and the data object has three specifications. BPMN 2.0 contains 116 elements. BPMN 2.0.2 included only minor modifications in terms of typos.

Given the magnitude of changes between the different versions of the BPMN notation, the sharp increase in publications following the introduction of the BPMN 2.0 notation can be considered a confirmation of research question R1. It is very interesting that publications in the field of BE did not appear until 2017.

Result: Research question R1—confirmed.

The average number of citations of the analysed documents was 2.22. The first quartile was 0, and the third quartile was 3.75. The median was equal to 1 and data variability above the third quartile was limited to seven citations. We identified two outliers values: 12 citations for Hasic, De Smedt & Vanthienen (2018) and 15 citations for article Wu et al. (2015).

Author analyses

Bibliometric analysis cannot be done without review by the authors. We focused on illustrating co-authorship. The total number of authors of publications selected for this study was 84: al achhab, m (1), aouina, zk (1), ayani, r (1), aysolmaz, b (1), bahaweres, rb (1), batoulis, k (1), ben ayed, ne (1), ben said, l (1), ben-abdallah, h (3), bisogno, s (1), bocciarelli, p (1), boukadi, k (1), braghetto, kr (1), burattin, a (1), calabrese, a (1), ceballos, hg (2), chien, cf (1), cho, sy (1), creese, s (1), cunha, p (1), d’ambrogio, a (1), d’ambrogio, sa (1), de lara, j (1), de smedt, j (2), demirors, o (1), duran, f (2), el hichami, o (1), el mohajir, b (1), ferreira, je (1), figl, k (1), fitriyah, a (1), flores-solorio, v (2), fookes, c (1), garcia-vazquez, jp (1), ghiron, nl (1), ghlala, r (1), gomez-martinez, e (1), hansen, z (1), hansen, znl (3), happa, j (1), hasic, f (2), herbert, lt (8), holm, g (1), iren, d (1), jacobsen, p (3), jobczyk, k (1), kamrani, f (1), khlif, w (2), kluza, k (1), ligeza, a (1), manuel vara, j (1), marcos, e (1), mazhar, s (1), mendling, j (1), mendoza morales, le (1), mengersen, k (1), monsalve, c (1), moradi, f (1), naoum, m (1), onggo, bss (1), pablo garcia, j (1), perez-blanco, f (1), pitchforth, j (1), proudlove, nc (1), rekik, m (1), rocha, c (2), rosemann, m (1), rozy, nf (1), salaun, g (2), sharp, r (4), sperduti, a (1), suchenia, a (1), tang, rz (1), tokdemir, g (1), tomaskova, h (1), vanden broucke, sklm (1), vanthienen, j (3), veluscek, m (1), villavicencio, m (1), vincent, jm (1), weske, m (1), wisniewski, p (1), wu, ppy (2), xie, y (1).

These authors formed different sized groups, as can be seen in Fig. 5. We grouped the authors according to their co-authors’ collaborations with a curve connecting the co-authors. The size of the node of this connection corresponds to the number of documents by the given author. The colours used to distinguish the authors were created using the average years of the publication of their papers.

For the authors’ average publication years, the first quartile was 2015, the third quartile was 2018.5 and the median was 2017. The variability outside the lower and upper quartiles was given by 2011 and 2020. We identified one outlier value corresponding to the year 2009.

The most prominent groups were around the authors listed in Fig. 6. This figure also contains the number of documents by the authors, their total number of citations and their average value.

According to this analysis Wu, P. Y. had the highest number of citations (7.5), followed by De Smedt, J. (7) and Hasic, F. (7). Herbert, L.T. had the most documents (8) and Tomaskova, H. had no co-author connections.

The authors were also analyzed in terms of their country or region affiliations. A total of 25 countries were identified and their location, including the number of relevant publications, are shown in Fig. 7. The countries with the highest number of affiliated publications were Denmark (8) and Tunisia (4), followed by Belgium, France, Saudi Arabia, Italy and Spain, who all had three.

Keywords analysis

The keywords were categorized according to those identified by the published authors and the keywords PLUS assigned by Clarivate Analytics databases. The data in KeyWords Plus are words or phrases that frequently appear in the titles of an article’s references but do not appear in the title of the item itself. Based upon a special algorithm that is unique to Clarivate Analytics databases, KeyWords Plus enhances the power of cited-reference searching by searching across disciplines for all the articles that have cited references in common, more information is on the web link Clarivate Analytics (2018). A total of 130 unique keywords and 46 unique KeyWords Plus keywords were found for selected publications.

A total of 130 author keywords were mentioned in the publications and a general view of their interconnection can be seen in Fig. 8.

Below is a list of all author keywords with the number of the weight-link to other keywords: activity theory (4), affiliation (6), agent based model (4), agent-based systems engineering (3), airport passenger facilitation (8), atl (5), automated verification (4), bayesian network (4), bayesian networks (4), bpm (6), bpmn (60), bpmn business processes (4), bpmn extension (3), bpmn model restructuring (5), business process (18), business process automation (3), business process management (13), business process model (5), business process model measures (3), business process modelling notation (4), business process optimisation (5), business process outsourcing (3), business processes (3), cloud computing (3), clustering (5), communication theory (11), configurable reference model (8), consequence modelling and management (10), contextual factors (8), cycle time (4), decision making (15), decision mining (3), decision model and notation (3), decision modeling (4), decision modelling (5), dikw (11), discrete-event simulation (4), dmn (15), effort prediction model (3), engineering agent-based systems (3), engineering systems (6), enterprise risk management (4), eqn (5), evolutionary algorithm (2), evolutionary algorithms (5), facilitated modelling (4), fault tree analysis (6), fault tree generation (6), flow (8), formal risk analysis (6), genetic algorithm (3), healthcare (4), hierarchical clustering (6), incident response (11), integrated modelling (5), interviews (11), jeqn (5), knowledge discovery (6), knowledge management (11), knowledge rediscovery (6), licenses (11), maude (7), mc-dmn (5), mcdm (5), mda (5), metrics (5), model checking (4), model transformations (5), model-driven architecture (4), model-driven engineering (5), modelling (4), object modeling (4), optimisation (6), organizational mining (3), performance (5), performance evaluation (3), petri nets (5), pproduction optimisation (2), preference to criteria (5), prism (8), probability (2), process configuration (8), process enhancement (3), process chain network (5), process merging (8), process mining (6), process modeling (4), process modelling (5), project management (3), qualitative analysis (4), quantitative model checking (10), quantitative service analysis (6), quantitative workflow analysis (4), queues (3), queuing theory (4), reliability analysis and risk assessment methods (4), resource allocation (4), restructuring (6), rewriting logic (7), rules (5), safety assessment software tools (4), safety management and decision making (4), security (11), security operation center (11), sense-making (11), separation of concerns (5), service engineering (6), scheduling (4), simulation (4), simulations (3), social network (5), social network analysis (3), social network model (6), socio-technical systems (sts) (4), soundness (4), space-sensitive process model (8), statistical model checking (4), stocastic bpmn (2), stochastic automata network (3), stochastic bpmn (11), stochastic model checking (13), stochastic modeling and analysis (4), structural and semantic aspects (5), tacit knowledge (11), task analysis (11), task assignment (4), task model (4), timed automata (4), topsis (5), verification (2).

As you can see in the figure, most of the author’s keywords are directly or indirectly linked with the term ‘BPMN’, but there are also isolated groups. In the following text, we’ve listed separate keyword groups. We’ve added a year of publication, a number of citations, and a specific document to which the keywords belong.

• 2013; citations; (business process automation; business process model measures; effort prediction model; project management) Aysolmaz, Iren & Demirors (2013).

• 2014; citation; (evolutionary algorithm; pproduction optimisation; stocastic bpmn) Herbert et al. (2014),

• 2015; citations; (agent based model; bayesian network; business process modelling notation; modelling; socio-technical systems (sts)) Wu et al. (2015),

• 2015; citation; (affiliation; bpm; hierarchical clustering; knowledge discovery; knowledge rediscovery; restructuring; social network model) Khlif & Ben-Abdallah (2015),

• 2016; citations; (bpmn extension; business process outsourcing; cloud computing; genetic algorithm) Rekik, Boukadi & Ben-Abdallah (2016).

• 2017; citations; (bpmn model restructuring; clustering; metrics; rules; social network; structural and semantic aspects) Khlif, Ben-Abdallah & Ben Ayed (2017).

• 2019; citations; (atl; business process model; model transformations; model-driven engineering; petri nets; process chain network) Gómez-Martnez et al. (2019).

As mentioned above, there were only 46 KeyWords Plus keywords (the number of links to other keywords is given in parentheses after the keyword): accuracy (6), ambiguity (6), automation (3), bpmn (20), business process models (6), checking (6), cognitive effectiveness (7), communities (2), complex (0), confidence (6), context (9), critical path (9), decision-making (7), design (7), dimensions (7), distributed simulation (1), framework (8), functional size (2), group creativity (6), identification (9), implementation (5), information (6), integration (2), model (7), neural-network (7), organizational knowledge (1), patterns (6), performance (9), process execution (9), process models (9), productivity (2), quality (2), reality (2), reference models (2), resources (9), risk (6), science research (2), semantics (9), sensemaking (1), simulation (9), strategy (0), systems (6), tables (7), verification (15), web (1), workflow (9).

As can be seen in Fig. 9, these keywords are far more separate from each other compared to the author’s keywords.

Classification of articles by methodology

Based on the expert assessment, we examined the documents regarding the methods and approaches used. We created seven groups corresponding to a method or approach that was an essential part of the publication: probabilistic models, Decision Model and Notation (DMN), dynamic task assignment problem, evolutionary and genetics algorithms, queuing theory, social networks and others. These groups were also based on keyword analysis, as some separate groups of copyright keywords belong to highly unique articles. We assigned each document to just one group. That is in contradiction to research areas, where one article can be attributed to more than one research area. The individual documents and their division between research areas and methodological groups can be seen in Table 3. We further analyzed the documents regarding their years of publication and plotted a bubble graph (Fig. 10) with the publication years on the x.axis and the methodological groups on the y-axis. The appropriate number of publications corresponding to the given year and the group is indicated in the respective bubble. This quantity is also graphically represented by the size of the given bubble.

The largest group consisted of 10 publications on DMN and BPMN. Given the initiate year of DMN, this is the most significant approach serving with BPMN. DMN 1.0 was made available to the public in September 2015, the OMG group released DMN 1.1 in June 2016, DMN 1.2 was released in January 2019 and the latest version of DMN 1.3 was released in March 2020. The latest version did not affect this systematic search; however, the growth of publications since 2017 (see Fig. 10, for example, was undoubtedly be affected by the DMN update.

We only assigned four documents to the methodological group focused on queue theory (See Table 3 and Fig. 10). The specific articles are listed in the following section under the appropriate heading. As the largest group was the DMN and BPMN group, we can thus rule out research question R3.

Result: Research question R3—not confirmed.

The methods, techniques and approaches used in the included publications are listed in the following section.