Towards a Business-Pattern Approach for UML Models Derivation from Business Process Models

Abstract

Business processes are considered as first class business assets in nowadays organizations. They are often specified using BPMN language. To automate business processes, software specialists specify the information systems that support them with the use of languages like UML. This paper aims to bridge the gap between the organization's business processes and the information systems that support them. It proposes a model-driven development method that automatically generates detailed UML domain models from business process models expressed in BPMN. Our approach is based on business patterns. It consists of three main transformations: the first transformation extracts the process value chain, the second transformation builds UML domain models for each process in the value chain, and the third transformation elaborates the UML models. We developed a proof-of-concept prototype tool using the Eclipse modeling ecosystem. We tested our approach on a set of business processes from the Enterprise Resource Planning literature. The results showed computational feasibility and the conceptual soundness of the approach.