Event-driven process chain

An event-driven process chain (EPC) is a type of flowchart used for business process modelling. EPCs can be used for configuring an enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation, and for business process improvement. Usage for control of work share with instances of autonomous workflows in workflow management is possible, but not yet implemented.

The event-driven process chain method was developed within the framework of Architecture of Integrated Information Systems (ARIS) by August-Wilhelm Scheer at the Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik, Universität des Saarlandes (Institute for Business Information Systems at the University of Saarland) in the early 1990s.

Businesses use event-driven process chain diagrams to lay out business process workflows, originally in conjunction with SAP R/3 modeling, but now more widely. It is used by many companies for modeling, analyzing, and redesigning business processes. The event-driven process chain method was developed within the framework of Architecture of Integrated Information Systems (ARIS). As such it forms the core technique for modeling in ARIS, which serves to link the different views in the so-called control view. To quote from a 2006 publication on event-driven process chains:

The statement that event-driven process chains are ordered graphs is also found in other directed graphs for which no explicit node ordering is provided. No restrictions actually appear to exist on the possible structure of EPCs, but nontrivial structures involving parallelism have ill-defined execution semantics; in this respect they resemble UML activity diagrams.

Several scientific articles are devoted to providing well-defined execution semantics for general event-driven process chains. One particular issue is that EPCs require non-local semantics, i.e., the execution behavior of a particular node within an EPC may depend on the state of other parts of the EPC, arbitrarily far away.

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