  BPMN is a specification language widely used by industry and researchers for
business process modeling and execution. It defines clearly how to articulate
its concepts, but do not provide mechanism to represent the semantics of the
produced models. This paper addresses the problem of how to improve the
expressiveness of BPMN models, proposing a definition for the semantics of a
business process within a BPMN model, and improving the completeness of the
models in a systematic manner, so that models can describe far more situations
with few extra managed complexity. We conceive a framework based on the
business transaction patterns available in the enterprise ontology body of
knowledge to prescribe the foundations of semantic BPMN models. A tool has been
developed to automate the framework. Then, two industrial proof-of-concepts are
used to measure its coverage, both positive and negative, and to argue about
our proposal's usefulness. After that, the proposal is compared with others
using a systematic literature review. A full BPMN pattern is proposed
encompassing the happy flow, the declinations, the rejections and the
revocations, without adding any new element to the BPMN specification. A
software tool has been developed, and made publicly available, to support the
automatic generation of the BPMN models from the proposed patterns. Our
semantified BPMN pattern allowed the identification of a large amount of
implicit, and other not implemented, situations in both proof-of-concepts. It
is concluded that the usage of a semantic solution, grounded on a sound
pattern, allows the systematic enrichment of the BPMN models with a bounded
effort. Moreover, to simplify the BPMN executable models' implementation, its
elements could be classified as implicit, explicit, or not implemented yet.
Finally, related work indicates that this work is demanded, but no full
solutions are available.

Software Engineering