Employing patterns for capturing solutions to recurring problems is an idea that stems from the field of architecture. Within the context of business process management (BPM), a wide spectrum of patterns has been identified and documented in prior studies. These patterns, which aid in the construction of business models, are structured into the following categories: workflow control-flow patterns, workflow data patterns, exception handling patterns, service interaction patterns, change patterns, workflow resource patterns, and activity patterns. In this paper, the authors close the gap by proposing patterns pertinent to the temporal aspect in workflows.

By exploiting the business models of different application domains, ten time patterns are discovered and coalesced into four groups. These encompass durations and time lags; restricting execution times; variability; and recurrent process elements. The completeness of the propounded time patterns is determined through the comparison of the patterns against publications returned by search engines. Besides, the patterns serve as a framework to assess the expressive power over time for a myriad of process-aware information systems, workflow languages, and academic-based approaches.

The lack of a formal treatment of the semantic basis for the time patterns is a shortcoming of the current work. Regardless of this criticism, the paper is a successful examination of temporal requirements concerning business process models. Its content is extremely useful to researchers and practitioners in the BPM arena.