Artifact-Centric Business Process Models in UML

Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 2015

In recent years, the artifact-centric approach to process modeling has attracted a lot of attention. One of the research lines in this area is finding a suitable way to represent the dimensions in this approach. Bearing this in mind, this paper proposes a way to specify artifact-centric business process models by means of well-known UML diagrams, from a high-level of abstraction and with a technology-independent perspective. UML is a graphical language, widely used and with a precise semantics.

2003

ABSTRACT Although UML offers models that can be used to describe business processes, many practitioners nevertheless prefer to employ languages that are specifically designed for this purpose. These business process languages typically provide only a weak integration with software modeling languages such as UML. To enhance the support of software development we therefore suggest to extend UML's activity diagrams with a business process semantics which leads us to Business Process Diagrams (BPDs).

Advanced Information Systems Engineering, 2015

This paper presents a way of checking the correctness of artifact-centric business process models defined using the BAUML framework. To ensure that these models are free of errors, we propose an approach to verify (i.e. there are no internal mistakes) and to validate them (i.e. the model complies with the business requirements). This approach is based on translating these models into logic and then encoding the desirable properties as satisfiability problems of derived predicates. In this way, we can then use a tool to check if these properties are fulfilled.

International Conference of the International …, 2002

UML and the Unified Process

Today, modeling business processes and modeling software is done using different notations that are designed to fit the special needs of the respective tasks. However, this fact results in a painful methodological gap between business models and software models, which is hard to bridge. This problem becomes even more painful if we try to build software to support certain business models because a smooth transition between the employed notations is usually not supported, or due to methodological problems, impossible. In order to allow for a smoother transition, we propose using Business Process Diagrams (BPDs), which are based on the UML activity diagrams ( in both business and software worlds). We show how to derive BPDs from the well-known business process language of Event-driven Process Chains (EPCs) using Petri nets as a common process meta- model.

Springer eBooks, 2015

In recent years, the artifact-centric approach to process modeling has attracted a lot of attention. One of the research lines in this area is finding a suitable way to represent the dimensions in this approach. Bearing this in mind, this paper proposes a way to specify artifact-centric business process models by means of well-known UML diagrams, from a high-level of abstraction and with a technology-independent perspective. UML is a graphical language, widely used and with a precise semantics.

2001

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a powerful notation for building software blueprints. This report shows UML diagrams of business processes that are used for analyzing information instead of building software blueprints. The diagrams capture business process information for a fictional internet company. Since the diagrams show both general and detailed information, they demonstrate that UML is capable of displaying various kinds of information. Flexible, easy to comprehend, and easy to build are traits that make UML diagrams a superior choice for business process modeling.

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. Many researchers discussed the transformation of UML AD and the Business Process 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.

Proceedings of the …, 2006

UML is posited as the "swiss army knife" for systems modelling and design activities. It embodies a number of modelling formalisms that have broad applicability in capturing both the static and dynamic aspects of software systems. One area of UML that has received particular attention is that of Activity Diagrams (ADs), which provide a high-level means of modelling dynamic system behaviour. In this paper we examine the suitability of UML 2.0 Activity Diagrams for business process modelling, using the Workflow Patterns as an evaluation framework. The Workflow Patterns are a collection of patterns developed for assessing control-flow, data and resource capabilities in the area of Process Aware Information Systems (PAIS). In doing so, we provide a comprehensive evaluation of the capabilities of UML 2.0 ADs, and their strengths and weaknesses when utilised for business process modelling.

Proceedings of the 23rd ACM International Conference on Conference on Information and Knowledge Management - CIKM '14, 2014

Artifact-centric business process models have gained increasing momentum recently due to their ability to combine structural (i.e., data related) with dynamical (i.e., process related) aspects. In particular, two main lines of research have been pursued so far: one tailored to business artifact modeling languages and methodologies, the other focused on the foundations for their formal verification. In this paper, we merge these two lines of research, by showing how recent theoretical decidability results for verification can be fruitfully transferred to a concrete UML-based modeling methodology. In particular, we identify additional steps in the methodology that, in significant cases, guarantee the possibility of verifying the resulting models against rich first-order temporal properties. Notably, our results can be seamlessly transferred to different languages for the specification of the artifact lifecycles.