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case for the models that did not comply with the style rules but could not be fixed auto-
matically. Most of them had an error in the business logic. An example in an EPC from
one of our own projects was an electric meter that was modelled as being working and
being out of order at the same time. Finding such flaws requires the understanding the
underlying business process. Existing tools that check technical properties of a model
(like absence of deadlocks etc.) are unable to find such errors. While human action is
required to find the errors in the business logic, checking the style rules can guide us
which models should be inspected manually because they most likely contain an error.
We emphasize that the proposed approach of applying additional well-formedness
checks to business process models is not restricted to EPCs. For example, some ideas
from Sect. 3 can be directly applied to YAWL[20] models. Other languages will re-
quire other style checking rules. For example, the syntax for UML Activity Diagrams
allows syntactically correct but absolutely useless constructions[21]. Performing a style
check on such UML diagrams before using them will help to detect errors and sources
for misunderstandings in an early stage of a project. Such style checks can be inte-
grated into a BPM editor and used in a similar way as style checkers for software
like Splint (www.splint.org), JLint (jlint.sourceforge.net) or FindBugs
(findbugs.sourceforge.net) which are known for enhancing the code quality
of software.
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