Research And Implementation Of Model-Driven Business Process Designer

With the combination of both BPM (Business Process Management) and SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), a promising solution to the highly efficient integration of enterprises is springing. In parallel, MDA (Modeling Driven Architecture) is proceeding rapidly on its way to a high maturity along with the perfection of supporting tools, which provides a solid foundation for the implementation. In this paper, we analize various mainstream business process meta-model and corresponding standards. By comparing both their merits and demerits, we find it much more difficult for them to meet the increasing requirements of integration and complex business processes. Meta-model nowdays are too complicated or too formalized to be understood by analysts. None of them could meet current business requirements smoothly. Moreover, not much support on usibility of modeling tools is available. Synchronization between design and source code views is usually a problem.In this paper, we abstract a refined business process meta-model in coping with the above problems which is aimed at the support of profound semantics with as small as possible a set of concepts. Besides, support of service architecture is proposed from within the metal-model level. Meanwhile, we take workflow patterns as the framework for evaluating our meta-model thoroughly and deeply. After that, issues of transformation between heterogeneous models are discussed with CuteMeta-based solutions proposed. Also, model validation for the correctness of controlling flow structure and semantics is discussed. On this basis, we choose GMF, which is an MDA implementation for Eclipse platform, for both designing and implementing CuteFlow– a business process modeling tool based on CuteMeta following the MDA methodology, which visualizes business process modeling, makes the communication between business analysts and IT specialists more smooth, and increases the efficiency of both the development and maintanence.Currently, CuteFlow has already been integrated with Wonders Business Process Engine which is in use at Wonders Research and Development Center with a good feedback also.