Extending UML to Support Business Activity Modeling

Abstract

This chapter presents an extension that makes UML better suited for business activity modeling. We extend UML’s activity diagrams with events in order to make UML more oriented towards modeling of business concepts. The resulting event-activity diagrams have several modeling advantages. They can be used to model a business as a set of concurrent activities that are synchronized by means of shared events and shared objects. This means that business activities can be modelled in a way that resembles the distributed and concurrent activities of real-worlds business actors. By staying inside UML we ensure that business analysts and software designers can use the same framework when they collaborate in a systems development project.