A Comparative Study of Business Process Management Tools based on Open Source Software and a Commercial Reference

This paper examines Business Process Management tools with a multiple attributive assessment framework based on the utility ranking and AHP method. It supplies a comprehensive list of eligible criteria for the assessment and provides a comparative analysis in terms of their features and development focus in relation to a commercial market leader (ARTS). Considering the age of the assessed OSS projects, their functionality for BPM is already impressive. The user innovations surfaced from the OSS tool analysis show that tools concentrate on model driven business process architectures. In the OSS world, the process and workflow models are seen as unified models. In the commercial world, workflow models are often referred to as an abstraction of the business process models concentrating on steps that can be automated. This work further supports the view at our research institution that OSS tools can already be used effectively in the class room in conjunction or even as alternative to commercial ones.