Much BPMN-related research over 40 years has been expended on Flow of control and activities: Petri nets, token networks, etc. There is still research work in characterization of ‘threads’ (simultaneous process instances) and multiple ‘tokens’ in a process graph. But I think this vein has been pretty well mined. Edward Barkmeyer

A BPMN problem area is the characterization of artifacts (typically bodies of information), which are usually described by a title and an informal description. A more formal description of critical and principal artifacts typically reaches out to other standards, which makes it difficult to deal with the relationship between artifact content, communications content, event characterization and flow decisions. This domain of research is sometimes called the “process-to-data linkage”. (I had a student who got her PhD in this area, and it was a hot topic during Framework Programme 8.) The typical problem showed up in the UPDM effort, where the process models are in BPMN and the information models are in UML. Edward Barkmeyer

A related topic of interest is the relationship between process models a la BPMN and HIPO models a la IDEF0, which are sophisticated ‘data flow diagrams’. The IDEF0 links are artifact flows, and any hint of process control is in the ‘control’ inputs to an IDEF0 Activity. BPMN and IDEF0 provide 2 views of the same process space. (IMO, UML Activity Diagrams are a less-accessible cousin to BPMN, and UML Information Flow Diagrams are inferior to IDEF0, and this issue is not very well resolved in UML 2.5.) Edward Barkmeyer