Performance analysis modeling applied to business processes

In order to improve efficiency in organizations, it is important to understand how organizational processes work and how they could be optimized. Our goal is to contribute to the Business Process Management research area providing a summary of the pros and cons of applying three well-known high-level formalisms in the business processes modeling for performance evaluation -- the Generalized Stochastic Petri Nets, the Performance Evaluation Process Algebra and the Stochastic Automata Networks. To evaluate the feasibility of the approaches, we consider criteria regarding the modeling perspective, such as the expressive power, abstraction, readability of the models, and the efficacy of their supporting software tools. Different scenarios are used to illustrate modeling characteristics commonly found in business processes and to evidence the advantages and disadvantages of each approach.