A formal framework to generate XPDL specifications from UML activity diagrams

Authors:
Nicolas Guelfi;Amel Mammar
Affiliations:
University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg-Kirchberg, Luxembourg;University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg-Kirchberg, Luxembourg
Venue:
Proceedings of the 2006 ACM symposium on Applied computing
Year:
2006

Citing 4
Cited 3

Transformation: The Missing Link of MDA

ICGT '02 Proceedings of the First International Conference on Graph Transformation
Extending UML Activity Diagram for Workflow Modeling in Production Systems

HICSS '02 Proceedings of the 35th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'02)-Volume 9 - Volume 9
Using UML to Design Distributed Collaborative Workflows: from UML to XPDL

WETICE '03 Proceedings of the Twelfth International Workshop on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises
Efficient: a toolset for building trusted B2B transactions

CAiSE'05 Proceedings of the 17th international conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering

A survey of UML models to XML schemas transformations

WISE'07 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Web information systems engineering
Exception handling in web service processes

The evolution of conceptual modeling
Controversy Corner: Automatic execution of business process models: Exploiting the benefits of Model-driven Engineering approaches

Journal of Systems and Software

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

The XML Process Definition Language (XPDL) is a standardized language allowing process definitions interchange between a variety of tools ranging from workflow management systems to modeling and simulation tools. On the other hand, UML activity diagrams offer a convenient notation to depict synthetic and intuitive views of systems that facilitate stakeholder communication. However, there is currently no tool able to animate activity diagrams using workflow management systems. Moreover, despite standardization efforts, diagram interchange across different modeling tools remains an issue. Hence, transforming UML activity diagrams into XPDL specifications would preserve stakeholder communication while enabling animation tool support. This paper presents a formal and optimal transformation of UML activity diagrams into XPDL specifications. This mapping is described through a set of formal translation rules defined from the UML activity metamodel to the XPDL metamodel. We demonstrate that the defined mapping process preserves some structural properties specified on the translated UML activity diagram.