Properties of Business Processes:

The investigation of properties of business

process models is an important
aspect of business process management. If a

certain property at the business
process model level can be shown, then all

process instances based on
that business process model expose this

property. In this chapter, the most
important properties for process models are

introduced and related to each
other.
While structural dependencies of processes are

important, dependencies
related to data processed during business

processes should be taken care of.
Structural properties of process models are at

the centre of attention; these
properties are neither application specific

nor domain specific. Conceptually,
the situation is similar to normalization in

database theory. If all tables in
a relational database schema are, for

instance, in third normal form, then
certain anomalies can no longer occur during

the run time of the database
applications.
Structural properties of business processes

have been investigated in the
context of Petri nets.
While soundness is an important criterion, it

appears to be too strong for
particular settings. Consequently, relaxed

soundness and weak soundness have
been introduced as less rigid properties that

are still helpful in analyzing business
process models.