Research On Model Driven Development Of Business Process Software

Complex and changing business requirements have made software developmentfacing with enormous difficulties, so since the Object Management Group proposed touse model-driven architecture (MDA) to solve this problem, the model-driven softwaredevelopment had become the research focus in software engineering. The keytechnologies of MDA involve with Computation Independent Model (CIM), PlatformIndependent Model (PIM), Platform Specific Model (PSM), and automatic modelconversion.In the domain of business process modeling, the computation independent modelof business processes can be illustrated and designed by Business Process ModelingNotation (BPMN), and saved by use of XPDL (XML Process Definition Language) inthe form of equivalent XML format for exchange process definition in Internetapplication environment. The platform-specific model can be designed by WorkflowFoundation (WF)4. Comprehensive research has been done on relevant model checkingand mapping techniques, some achievements and contributions are as follows:1. To resolve the formal checking of business process model, a special Petri netnamed Business Process Flow net (BPF-net) is proposed to transform business processmodel into Petri Nets. A universal tool is also developed to convert and check businessprocess model. An inter-organizational order process in supply chain is modeled byusing of BPF-net. Experimental results show that BPF-net could transform the businessmodel conforming to XPDL specifications into Petri net model in PNML format, whichcan thus easily be analyed with Petri net tools.2. In order to convert a XPDL model to a flowchart in WF4directly, the method tocheck the structure of business process models was proposed. A few correspondingmethods are proposed to cope with model adjustment in case that it fails in the check.Experimental results have shown that these methods can be used to improve quality ofbusiness process models.3. A method to mapping timer event in business process model into activity in WF4was proposed. Experiment results have shown that the mapped flowchart model satisfies the functionality of timer event.4. This paper proposes the mapping method for data-based gateways from XPDLto WF4. Experiment results have shown that data-based gateways in XPDL, includingExclusive gateways and well-structured Parallel, Inclusive and Complex gateways, canbe implemented using the flowchart models in WF4.5. In order to develop software for business process with compensations rapidly, anautomatic model mapping method is presented. The tool for model conversion andtesting is implemented on the.Net platform. Experiment results have shown that thismethod satisfies the functional requirement of compensations, and improves the speedof software development for business processes.