Despite the number and variety of business process modelling languages and notations available in the Business Process Management field, all of them mainly focus on a single type of relationship holding between business process activities, namely the activity execution order within the control flow. However, other types of relationships may hold between activities (e.g., co-occurrence or causal constraints) and the motivation behind these relationships can also be different (e.g., a norm or an ontological law-of-nature). In this paper, we focus on one type of these activity relationships whose semantics goes beyond the semantics of arrows in traditional business process modelling languages, i.e., on the so called occurrence dependences. In particular, we aim at evaluating whether making these occurrence dependences explicit in business process models could support business process modellers and analysts in their tasks. To this aim, we propose a notation for representing the occurrence dependences and their rationale, and carry out an empirical study with human subjects for evaluating their support in comprehension and redesign tasks; in addition, we qualitatively investigate the effort required for enriching business process models with these dependences.

尽管“业务流程管理”字段中提供了多种多样的业务流程建模语言和符号，但它们都主要集中于业务流程活动之间的一种类型的关系保持，即控制流内的活动执行顺序。但是，活动之间可能存在其他类型的关系（例如，共现或因果约束），这些关系背后的动机也可能不同（例如，规范或本体论的自然规律）。在本文中，我们关注这些活动关系中的一种，其语义超出了传统业务流程建模语言中箭头的语义，即所谓的出现依赖性。。特别是，我们旨在评估在业务流程模型中明确显示这些发生依赖关系是否可以支持业务流程建模者和分析人员执行其任务。为此，我们提出了一种表示出现依赖及其理论依据的符号，并与人类受试者进行了一项实证研究，以评估他们在理解和重新设计任务中的支持；另外，我们定性地研究了丰富具有这些依赖关系的业务流程模型所需的工作。