UMLPACE for Modeling and Verification of Complex Business Requirements in Event-Driven Process Chain (EPC)

Abstract

Business processes (BPs) are often modeled to elaborate process-related business requirements (BRs). This leads to verify the complex BRs in early automation stages. Among various BP languages, event-driven process chain (EPC) is a well-known semi-formal modeling language, which is verifiable after transforming it into any other formal language, such as, timed automata or Petri nets. However, full potential of EPC cannot be exploited as yet because existing EPC tools can only model or verify the simple patterns and they lack the modeling/verification of complex patterns. Moreover, only the proprietary tools are available, which limit its applicability toward overwhelming utilization amongst widespread practitioners and research community. This research work is the first attempt to make EPC more expressive in terms of modeling complex patterns for real time systems. Particularly, the UMLPACE (Unified Modeling Language Profile for Atomic and Complex events in EPC) has been developed, which adapts the concepts of UML activity diagram for representing both simple as well as complex patterns in EPC. As a part of research, a complete open source transformation engine is developed to transform UMLPACE source models into timed automata target models for the verification of complex BPs. The implementation of transformation engine is carried out in JAVA language and Acceleo tool through model-to-text transformation approach. Finally, the broader applications of UMLPACE are demonstrated through two benchmark case studies.

Keywords

• Business processes
• BPML
• complex events
• EPC
• UMLPACE
• verification