BPMN 2.0: The state of support and implementation

The Business Process Model and Notation 2.0 (BPMN) standard has been hailed as a major step in business process modeling and automation. Recently, it has also been accepted as an ISO standard. The expectation is that vendors of business process management systems (BPMS) will switch to the new standard and natively support its execution in process engines. This paper presents an analysis of the current state and evolution of BPMN 2.0 support and implementation. We investigate how BPMN 2.0 implementers deal with the standard, showing that native BPMN 2.0 execution is an exception. Only three out of 47 BPMS considered support the execution format defined in the standard, although all of them claim to comply to the BPMN 2.0 standard. Furthermore, we evaluate three process engines that do provide native BPMN support, namely camunda BPM, jBPM and activiti, and examine the evolution of their degree of support over a period of more than three years. This lets us delimit the areas of the standard that are considered important by the implementers. Since there is only a limited increase in supported features over the past years, it seems that the implementation of the standard is more or less concluded from the perspective of the implementers. Hence, it is unlikely that features which are not available by now will be implemented in the future. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.