What is UML Collaboration

The authors of this chapter argue that business processes can be modeled in the same way as collaborative business services, and therefore use an approach developed for such services. They consider business services that are collaborative and crosscutting in nature; several participants may collaborate in a business service to achieve its goal, and a participant may take part in several different business services, playing different roles in each. A framework to support the development and composition of such business services is the main focus of this chapter. The authors use UML collaborations for modeling the structure of roles involved in a business service/process, and activity diagrams for specifying the global behavior performed by the roles. From these models, reusable components realizing the roles can be automatically synthesized, and such components can then be composed together in order to make different systems that meet the requirements of business services.