A Survey on Business Process View Integration

TL;DR

This survey reviews the evolution and current state of business process view integration, highlighting techniques, practical classifications, and future research directions including blockchain applications.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive systematic review of business process view integration solutions from 1970s to present, including a new classification and exploration of future trends.

Findings

Most solutions use annotation and formal merging rules

The study classifies solutions based on practicality

Highlights potential of blockchain for view integration

Abstract

The complexity of a business environment often causes organizations to produce several inconsistent views on the same business process, leading to fragmentation and inefficiencies. Business process view integration attempts to produce an integrated view from different views of the same model, facilitating the management of models. To study trends around business process view integration, we conduct a systematic literature review to summarize findings since the 1970s, up to its potential novel applications. With a starting corpus of 798 documents, this survey draws up a systematic inventory of solutions used in academia and in the industry. By narrowing it down to 51 articles, we discuss in-depth 15 business process integration techniques papers. After that, we classify existing solutions according to their practicality. Our study shows that most integrated views are constructed by annotation, using formal merging rules. Finally, we explore possible future research directions. We highlight the application of view integration to the blockchain research area, where stakeholders can have different views on the same blockchain. We expect that this study contributes to interdisciplinary research across view integration.