Sustainability Analysis Patterns for Process Mining and Process Modelling Approaches
Andreas Fritsch
TL;DR
This paper tackles the lack of a solid framework for measuring sustainability impacts in BPM and Process Mining. It introduces Sustainability Analysis Patterns that map Life Cycle Assessment concepts onto BPM, using OCEL 2.0 and ILCD meta-models to enable a life-cycle view of processes. The four patterns cover inputs/outputs, impacts, scopes, and allocation to facilitate comparable, transparent sustainability analyses and to guide both practitioners and researchers in integrating sustainability capabilities. Through a structured evaluation of existing modelling and mining approaches, the work reveals current gaps (especially in impact measurement, scope definition, and allocation) and positions the patterns as a foundation for future developments in Sustainable BPM. The approach demonstrates how LCA-inspired reasoning can inform BPM tool design and analysis, with significant implications for more sustainable process management and value-chain thinking.
Abstract
Business Process Management (BPM) has the potential to help companies manage and reduce their activities' negative social and environmental impacts. However, so far, only limited capabilities for analysing the sustainability impacts of processes have been integrated into established BPM methods and tools. One of the main challenges of existing Sustainable BPM approaches is the lack of a sound conception of sustainability impacts. This paper describes a set of sustainability analysis patterns that integrate BPM concepts with concepts from existing sustainability analysis methods to address this challenge. The patterns provide a framework to evaluate and develop process modelling and process mining approaches for discovering, analysing and improving the sustainability impacts of processes. It is shown how the patterns can be used to evaluate existing process modelling and process mining approaches.