Business Processes in UML

2011

Researchers in software engineering proposed design method for distributed applications to construct a set of communicating system components from a global behavior. The joint behaviors of these components must precisely satisfy the specified global behavior. The next concern is to transform the constructed models of these components into executable business processes by ensuring the exchange of asynchronous messages among the generated business processes. The introduction of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has helped to achieve this goal. SOA provides high flexibility in composing looselyintegrated services that can be used among business domains to carry out business transactions; this composition is known as service orchestration. Moreover, SOA supports Model Driven Architecture (MDA) such that services modeled as UML Activity Diagrams (AD) can be transformed into a set of Business Execution Language (BPEL) processes. Modeling Notation (BPMN) into BPEL. However, they did not discuss the practical limitations that some of these transformations impose. This thesis addresses the imitations of the transformation from UML AD to BPEL processes using the IBM Rational Software Architect (RSA). We showed here that the tool is unable to create the correct BPEL artifacts from UML AD components in certain cases, for instance when the behavior includes the alternative for receiving single or concurrent messages, a weak loop, or certain choice activities. Furthermore, we provided novel solutions to the transformations in these cases in order to facilitate the transformation from UML AD to BPEL.

The Journal of Object Technology, 2009

Activity Diagram is an important component of the set of diagrams used in UML. The OMG document on UML 2.0 proposes a Petri net based semantics for Activity Diagrams. While Petri net based approach is useful and interesting, it does not exploit the underlying inherent reactive behaviour of activity diagrams. In the first part of the paper, we shall capture activity diagrams in synchronous language framework to arrive at executional models which will be useful in model based design of software. This also enables validated code generation using code generation mechanism of synchronous language environments such as Esterel and its programming environments. Further, the framework leads to scalable verification methods. The traditional semantics proposed in OMG standard need enrichment when the activities are prone to failure and need compensating actions. Such extensions are expected to have applications in modelling complex business processes. In the second part of the paper, we propose an enrichment of the UML Activity Diagrams that include compensable actions. We shall use some of the foundations on Compensable Transactions and Communicating Sequential Processes due to Tony Hoare. This enriched formalism allows UML Activity Diagrams to model business processes that can fail and require compensating actions.

Proceedings of the Second Edition of the International Workshop on Experiences and Empirical Studies in Software Modelling, 2012

A software developer facing a modelling task may follow different styles at different levels of abstraction and precision, to better cope with the aims and the potential users of the model. We address the problem of modelling the business processes by means of UML activity diagrams, and present five styles differing in the precision level, from the Ultra-Light style, where the nodes and the edges of the activity diagram are decorated by freely-formed text, to precise styles where instead OCL and UML actions are used. Then, we propose a practical empirical method for choosing the most suitable style depending on the context in which the models will be used (why, when, where, how long, by whom).

WSEAS Transactions on …, 2007

The evolution of Enterprise Information Systems(EIS) has been shift from data-centric information systems to process-centric information systems in last decade. Business Process Management(BPM), extension of Workflow Management(WFM) contains methods, techniques and tools to support the design, enactment, management and analysis of business process. Petri Nets(PN) are used like standard for BPM and WFM technology. Our approach is to define a methodology for analyze, design, implement, maintain EIS only with Computer Aided Software Engineering(CASE) tools, according to Model Driven Architecture(MDA) from Platform Independent Models(PIMs) to Platform Specific Models(PSMs). In our approaches we proposed an extension of Object Constraint Language(OCL), Complete Constraint Language(CCL) in idea to use the Activity Diagram(AD) from Unified Modeling Language(UML) as formal basis for BPM and WFM technology, respectively Entity Relationship-Stored Procedures(ER-SP), an extension of ER(Entity Relationship) model for conceptual, syntactic and semantic modeling of relational databases in idea to create a link between external to physical models.

Business Process Reuse is an important phase in the Business Process life-cycle that for some reason has not attracted enough attention. To support the reuse phase we are building a software infrastructure called the Process Assembler. Process reuse involves many steps. In the paper we briefly discuss all of them, but then focus only on the mapping from one process definition language (which is Petri Nets) into another (Event-driven Process Chains). We build the mapping algorithm and support it by software, which is the core of the Mapper component of a system that is currently under construction. An example demonstrating the work of the algorithm is also provided.

2005

The unified modelling language (UML) is a de facto standard for object-oriented modelling. However, the formal semantics for the notations included in UML are not provided, which are a key requirement for the verification and evaluation purposes. To solve this problem, Petri nets formalism has been used as a complement to UML in several research projects. However, there is not a complete transformation technique for all concepts and diagrams of UML to an extension of Petri nets. We have recently introduced object stochastic activity networks (OSANs). OSANs are a high-level modelling formalism that integrates object-orientation into stochastic activity networks (SANs), which are a powerful and flexible stochastic extension of Petri nets. In this paper, we present some transformation techniques for the most important concepts and diagrams of UML into OSANs. The resulting OSAN models can be used for the evaluation purposes by analytic or simulation methods. As a case study, we have used the proposed technique for transformation and evaluation of a use case diagram.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2001

If UML activity diagrams are to succeed as a standard in the area of organisational process modeling, they need to compare well to alternative languages such as those provided by commercial Workflow Management Systems. This paper examines the expressiveness ...

AGRIS on-line Papers in Economics and Informatics, 2017

This paper summarizes the current knowledge of business process modelling languages, which is increasingly important also in the agri-food industry. It describes the history of business process modelling, currently mostly used alternatives-UML, BPMN, EPC and recaps their strengths and features in which they outperform the others. As demonstrated all three notations can adequately model business processes. They do however differ in some specific features. In some aspects, each of the languages always outperforms the others. Important is that except of some general objective features where the languages differ, there is also a lot of subjective perception of how the single notations perform.

1996

A wide range of applications deal with the manipulation and expression of collections of activities. Examples include project management, workflow management, business process reengineering, product realization process modeling, manufacturing process planning, production scheduling, simulation, and Computer Aided Software Engineering, each of which is supported by some combination of graphical programming and control languages, Petri nets, PERT charts or other representation methodology. Each of these applications serves a specific audience and need, and focuses on particular aspects of a process. Nevertheless, much could be gained by sharing information among applications. One of the primary obstacles to such integration is the lack of any common representation of what is really the common underlying concept of process. The objective of the work described here is an investigation of the feasibility of a unifying specification of process which is applicable to all of the above applications, yet powerful and robust enough to meet each set of requirements. This document represents the results of the first phase of the work-that of researching the process representational requirements for design/manufacturing process life-cycle applications. These requirements are categorized into four categories; core, outer core, extensions, and application, which aided in describing the role of the requirements in the overall challenge of process representation.

Understanding and specifying business processes is a challenge. Many different approaches have been developed, each with their own specific business process modelling languages designed to meet a business specific requirements. In practice, however, multiple business process languages are often being used within one and the same enterprise. This paper proposes a universal and language independent abstraction of the concepts of today's mainstream business process modelling languages, in a unified ontology based on an analysis of seven popular business process modelling approaches. Generic concepts are identified and a unified meta-model designed. An ontological analysis of the representational capability of this meta-model is examined in relation to the Bunge-Wand-Weber ontology. This meta-model is open to further extensions such as incorporating requirements or extending into a knowledge base.