Ten years of visualization of business process models: A systematic literature review

• Published in: Computer standards and interfaces 2019-10, Vol.66, p.103347, Article 103347
• Main Authors: Stein Dani, Vinicius, Dal Sasso Freitas, Carla Maria, Thom, Lucinéia Heloisa
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Business process engineering; Business process management; Exploration; Feedback; Literature reviews; Modelling; Process model; Proposals; Scientific visualization; Systematic literature review; Visualization; Visualization analysis
• ISSN: 0920-5489; 1872-7018
• DOI: 10.1016/j.csi.2019.04.006

•First systematic review about visualization applied to business process modeling.•Few studies base their proposals on the BPMN ISO standard.•Classification of the surveyed studies based on their main scope.•Classification of the revised literature based on a visualization design framework.•Few articles address visual feedback about problems in process models. Business process modeling is an essential task in business process management. Process models that are comprehensively understood by business stakeholders allow organizations to profit from this field. In this work, we report what is being investigated in the topic “visualization of business process models”, since visualization is known as improving perception and comprehension of structures and patterns in datasets. We performed a systematic literature review through which we selected and analyzed 46 papers from two points of view. Firstly, we observed the similarities between the papers regarding their main scope. From this observation we classified the papers into six categories: “Augmentation of existing elements”, “Creation of new elements”, “Exploration of the 3D space”, “Information visualization”, “Visual feedback concerning problems detected in process models” and “Perspectives”. The less explored categories and which could represent research challenges for further exploration are “Visual feedback” and “Information visualization”. Secondly, we analyzed the papers based on a well-known visualization analysis framework, which allowed us to obtain a high-level point of view of the proposals presented in the literature and could identify that few authors explore user interaction features in their works. Besides that, we also found that exactly half of the papers base their proposals on BPMN and present results from evaluation or validation. Since BPMN is an ISO standard and there are many tools based on BPMN, there should be more research intending to improve the knowledge around this topic. We expect that our results inspire researchers for further work aiming at bringing forward the field of business process model visualization, to have the advantages of information visualization helping the tasks of business process modeling and management.