Towards Ecological Workflow Patterns as an Instrument to Optimize Business Processes with Respect to Ecological Goals

摘要

With this paper, we introduce the concept of Ecological Workflow Patterns (EWPs) in the domain of Green Business Process Management (Green BPM). The optimization of processes with respect to ecological goals often faces difficulties in adapting to the revised process. Also the consequences of changes to the process are often not predictable which makes necessary the application of simulation measures [1]. We identified ecological weaknesses of processes from existing literature and from process models and applied the concept of patterns to formalize the weaknesses. As a result, we created four initial EWPs from control-flow, operational and data perspective that serve as a blueprint for the development of ecologic-sustainable processes at design time or for the optimization of existing processes. The results of this paper represent the starting point for future efforts to extract more EWPs and to conceptualize the representation of the patterns.