Behind the scenes of the BPMN extension mechanism principles, problems and options for improvement

The Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is a standard for modeling business processes that is widely used and accepted both in academia and industry due to its well-defined meta model, its large set of concepts and its extensibility. BPMN is one of very few modeling languages that provides an integrated extension mechanism. However, the mechanism is not often implemented in research articles or in professional practice. We suppose, that both syntactical and methodical aspects within the BPMN extension mechanism may cause misunderstandings and uncertainty regarding its implementation. Therefore, we conducted an in-depth analysis of the extension mechanism in order to rationally figure out problematic aspects. These aspects are consolidated and compared to two existing BPMN extension methods. Based on that, a range of further research topics is finally derived.