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Purpose Business process workflow is a design conceptualization to automate the sequence of activities to achieve a business goal with involved participants and a predefined set of rules. Regarding this, a formal business workflow model is a prime requisite to implement a consistent and rigorous business process. In this context, majority of the existing research works are formalized structural features and have not focused on functional and behavioral design aspects of business processes. To address this problem, this paper aims to propose a formal model of business process workflow called as business process workflow using typed attributed graph (BPWATG) enriched with structural, functional and behavioral characteristics of business processes. Design/methodology/approach Typed attributed graph (ATG) and first-order logic have been used to formalize proposed BPWATG to provide rigorous syntax and semantics towards business process workflows. This is an effort to execute a business workflow on an automated machine. Further, the proposed BPWATG is illustrated using a case study to show the expressiveness of proposed model. Besides, the proposed graph is initially validated using generic modelling environment (GME) case tool. Moreover, a comparative study is performed with existing formal approaches based on several crucial features to exhibit the effectiveness of proposed BPWATG. Findings The proposed model is capable of facilitating structural, functional and behavioral aspects of business process workflows using several crucial features such as dependency conceptualization, timer concepts, exception handling and deadlock detection. These features are used to handle real-world problems and ensure the consistency and correctness of business workflows. Originality/value BPWATG is proposed to formalize a business workflow that is required to make a model of business process machine-readable. Besides, formalizations of dependency conceptualization, exception handling, deadlock detection and time-out concepts are specified. Moreover, several non-functional properties (reusability, scalability, flexibility, dynamicity, reliability and robustness) are supported by the proposed model.