Business Processes in UML

Abstract

Today, modeling business processes and modeling software is done using different notations that are designed to fit the special needs of the respective tasks. However, this fact results in a painful methodological gap between business models and software models, which is hard to bridge. This problem becomes even more painful if we try to build software to support certain business models because a smooth transition between the employed notations is usually not supported, or due to methodological problems, impossible. In order to allow for a smoother transition, we propose using Business Process Diagrams (BPDs), which are based on the UML activity diagrams ( in both business and software worlds). We show how to derive BPDs from the well-known business process language of Event-driven Process Chains (EPCs) using Petri nets as a common process meta- model.