Requirements for a modeling language to specify and match business process improvement patterns

Businesses are always looking for opportunities to improve their processes in order to become more efficient and effective. Patterns for business process improvement have been defined and used as best practices to help analysts discover such opportunities. A modeling language allowing analysts to define or use a predefined library of improvement patterns to detect improvement opportunities in business processes can be of a significant value. Based on a comprehensive set of improvement patterns from the literature, this paper defines the requirements for a modeling language to support a framework capable of defining and detecting such patterns. We use an example from the retail industry to motivate the collected requirements. The paper´s contributions allow us to capture more sophisticated business process improvement patterns, bringing us one step closer to a comprehensive model-driven, aspect-oriented business process modeling language. Furthermore, the collected requirements for the desired modeling language clearly indicate that currently popular business process modeling languages are not yet capable of capturing all the required details for business process improvement patterns on a broad scale.