EPClets - A Lightweight and Flexible Textual Language to Augment EPC Process Modelling

Event-driven Process Chains (EPC) has been widely adopted as a business process modeling notation. The common practice is to use a software tool to build a directed graph consisting of EPC constructs to model a business process. If a change is required, the constructed graph is partially dismantled and reconstructed. While the graph-based representation is beneficial in providing visualization, we investigate in this paper the advantages of having a textual representation alongside the graph representation. We introduce a textual language, called EPClets, to represent an EPC graph as a set of declarative event-action rules. The EPC graph can be constructed incrementally and automatically from the textual representation, separating the business-process specification and graph (re)construction concerns. The advantages of our approach have been evaluated through a controlled experiment. The experimental results suggest that having a textual representation alongside the graph representation increases the efficiency compared to an entirely graph-based approach.