Data-Flow Modeling: A Survey of Issues and Approaches

This paper presents a survey of previous research on modeling the data flow perspective of business processes. When it comes to modeling and analyzing business process models the current research focuses on control flow modeling (i.e. the activities of the process) and very little attention is paid to the data-flow perspective. But data is essential in a process. In order to execute a workflow, the tasks need data. Without data or without data available on time, the control flow cannot be executed. For some time, various researchers tried to investigate the data flow perspective of process models or to combine the control and data flow in one model. This paper surveys those approaches. We conclude that there is no model showing a clear data flow perspective focusing on how data changes during a process execution. The literature offers some similar approaches ranging from data modeling using elements from relational database domain, going through process model verification and ending with elements related to Web Services.