Analysis and Design of International Trade Procedures: UML to DPN

The analysis of international trade procedures has long been regarded as an important aspect of trade facilitation. For the past decade or so, efforts have been made to utilize formal notations for this analysis, to help highlight points of congestion and redundancy. Recent innovations in e-commerce technologies suggest that an additional step may be possible: generic, electronic trade procedures that can be easily downloaded and installed by a wide variety of small to medium sized trading parties. This would make safe, trustworthy global commerce widely available to any company with a minimum investment of office computers and network access. This paper has addresses an important technical step in this process: the compatibility between UML, a popular analysis notation for trade procedures, and DPN's a design representation that allows for the automatic computerization of the trade procedure. This convertability among representations, allowing a smooth development methodology, illustrated and supported in the design and prototyping tool, InterProcs, which is also briefly described.