Sometimes Less Is More: Are Process Modeling Languages Overly Complex

Modern business process modeling languages such as BPMN or EPC provide users with more constructs to represent real world situations than their predecessors such as IDEF or Petri Nets. But this apparent increase in expressiveness is accompanied by an increase in language complexity. In practice many organizations choose to only use a subset of the available modeling constructs. Using a well established ontology-based theory of representation, the authors analyze how this voluntary restriction affects the expressiveness and complexity of the resulting modeling vocabulary.