Event-Driven Process Chain for Modeling and Verification of Business Requirements–A Systematic Literature Review

Automation of any business process primarily requires the identification of clear and precise requirements. However, the initially collected business requirements are usually expressed in natural language that creates ambiguities among different stakeholders. To overcome this problem, various business process modeling languages (BPMLs) have been introduced to represent the business requirements graphically. In this context, event-driven process chain (EPC) is a well-known BPML that supports the modeling and verification of business requirements in early automation phases. Although EPC is frequently researched to improve its modeling and verification capabilities, there is no study available yet to the best of our knowledge that examines and summarizes the latest EPC developments. Therefore, in this article, we comprehensively investigate the latest EPC approaches, trends, and tools for the modeling and verification of business requirements. Particularly, a systematic literature review is carried out to select and analyze 73 research studies published during 1998-2017. Consequently, the selected studies are classified into six categories, i.e., modeling (14), transformation (13), verification (17), general (20), semantics (5), and requirement (4). Moreover, latest EPC modeling approaches are identified and analyzed, i.e., UML (2), meta-model (3), integration (5), and EPC notations (4). Furthermore, EPC verification methods are also investigated, i.e., EPC (6), petri-nets (8), and other languages (3). Finally, 25 leading EPC tools have been presented, i.e., existing tools (14), proposed/developed tools, (5) and additional tools (6). It has been concluded that EPC provides adequate approaches and tool support for the modeling and verification of simple business requirements through atomic events. However, the complex business requirements cannot be modeled and verified through EPC due to the lack of complex event processing. Consequently, there is a strong need to include the support for the modeling and verification of complex events in EPC to manage multifaceted business requirements.