Formal Grammars in Business Process Management: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Business Process Management (BPM) is concerned with the systematic design, execution, monitoring, and improvement of business processes. Formal grammars have emerged as a particularly fruitful formalism for BPM, offering generative, declarative, and analytical capabilities that are uniquely well-suited to process-oriented concerns. This paper presents a systematic literature review of 34 primary studies at the intersection of formal grammars and BPM. We identify seven research streams: (i) process grammars for organizational process design; (ii) process modeling languages evaluated as grammars under the Bunge-Wand-Weber ontological framework; (iii) production-rule grammars for process structural specification and variant management; (iv) attribute grammars for the declarative specification and distributed execution of workflows; (v) graph grammars for the transformation, generation, and semantic analysis of process models; (vi) grammatical inference for process mining and discovery; and (vii) process algebras as grammar-like compositional frameworks for behavioral specification and verification. For each stream, we synthesize contributions, formalisms employed, and limitations. The review reveals that formal grammars have influenced BPM across every lifecycle phase (from organizational design to formal verification and data-driven discovery) yet the seven streams have developed largely in parallel, without cross-stream synthesis. We identify five corpus-grounded open challenges and argue that a deeper, unified exploitation of grammatical theory holds significant promise for advancing the state of the art in BPM.