Well-structuredness, safeness and soundness: A formal classification of BPMN collaborations

The BPMN standard has a huge uptake in modelling business processes within the same organisation or collaborations involving multiple interacting participants. It is widely accepted by the Business Process Management community that a solid formal framework for the notation can help designers to properly understand their BPMN models as well as to state and verify model properties. With this aim in mind, we provide a formal characterisation of BPMN collaborations and some of the most significant correctness properties in the business process domain; namely, well-structuredness, safeness and soundness. We exploit this formalisation to classify BPMN models according to the properties they satisfy and their compositionality, resulting in a systematic study that gives evidence of expected results, closes conjectures and provides novel results. An experimentation to assess the impact of the considered properties on the practice of modelling is carried out on the BPMN models available in a public and populated repository.