On the Evolution of BPMN 2.0 Support and Implementation

Abstract

The Business Process Model and Notation 2.0 (BPMN) standard has been hailed as a major step in business process modeling and automation. Recently, it has also been accepted as an ISO standard. The expectation is that vendors of business process management systems (BPMS) will switch to the new standard and natively support its execution in process engines. This paper presents an analysis of the current state and evolution of BPMN 2.0 support and implementation. We investigate how current BPMN 2.0 implementers deal with the standard, showing that native BPMN 2.0 execution still is an exception. Most BPMS do not support the execution format, despite claiming to be BPMN 2.0 compliant. Furthermore, building on past work, we evaluate three process engines that do provide native BPMN support and examine the evolution of their degree of support over a three-year period. This lets us delimit the areas of the standard that are considered important by the implementers. Since there is hardly an increase in supported features over the past three years, it seems that the implementation of the standard is more or less seen as finished by vendors and it is unlikely that features which are not available by now will be implemented in the future.