A Critical Analysis of Workflow Patterns

We report work in progress about a critical analysis of the 43 workflow patterns recently presented by the Business Process Modeling Center in [14]. We disambiguate the natural language pattern descriptions given there, complete them by explicitly addressing relevant features that were left open in [14], and replace the Petri net formalizations, provided there to further illustrate the patterns, by truly abstract yet rigorous models, avoiding to introduce details that pertain only to the description framework and not to the problems addressed by the patterns. We identify parameters which turn numerous of the analyzed workflow patterns into instances of one main pattern, thus streamlining the pattern classification proposed in [14].