Translating BPMN Models into UML Activities
Mar´ıa Agustina Cibra´n
THALES
ThereSIS Security & Information Systems
Route De´partamentale 128 - 91767 Palaiseau Cedex - France
maria-agustina.cibran@thalesgroup.com
Abstract. In business-driven development, IT architects must face the
challenge of building IT solutions that are aligned with business processes
in order to satisfy business requirements. To this endeavor, they must
understand those business processes, which requires extensive collabora-
tion with domain experts and analysts. Because business processes are
typically expressed using dedicated modeling notations - e.g. BPMN - IT
architects are forced to master their particularities. In order to support
IT architects in performing the business-IT alignment, an approach for
the automatic translation from BPMN models to UML activity models
is proposed. By means of re-expressing business processes in a language
that is closer to the architecture, the synchronization of the process mod-
els with other UML architectural models is enabled. In addition, archi-
tects are relieved from having to master BPMN. This paper reports on
the challenges of defining and implementing such a translation. ATL is
used as the model transformation language.
Keywords: BDD, BPMN, UML Activities, Model Transformations,
ATL, MDA, MDE.
1 Introduction
Business Process Modeling [1] aims at representing the processes of a domain
or business by creating dedicated business process models. It is an activity that
is typically performed by business analysts and managers with the objective
of improving clarity and accuracy of business requirements. It also contributes
to realizing a more efficient communication between domain and IT experts. In
addition, having explicit business process models enables the improvement of the
processes efficiency and quality. A business process model typically represents
interrelated business organizations and roles as well as it depicts the flow or
progression of activities - tasks and subprocesses - each of which representing the
work of a person, an internal system, or the process of a partner company towards
some business goal. Nowadays, one of the most popular standard languages for
the representation of business process models is the Business Process Modeling
Notation (BPMN) [2].
In Business-Driven Development (BDD) [3] the goal is to develop IT solutions
that directly satisfy business requirements and needs. Because the starting step
D. Ardagna et al. (Eds.): BPM 2008 Workshops, LNBIP 17, pp. 236–247, 2009.
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© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009

Translating BPMN Models into UML Activities 237
for BDD is the creation of business process models, aligning business processes
and IT solutions is crucial. This alignment implies the need for adapting the
methodology used to derive the IT solution, to be able to use business process
models as input artifacts to the design and development phases of the software
development life cycle. However, aligning business processes to existing software
methodologies is not an easy task: it does not only imply the need for under-
standing the business goals and expectations but it also requires taking deci-
sions about which parts of the business processes are automated - vs. manually
performed tasks - and clearly defining and realizing non-functional properties.
These steps typically imply the need for extensive collaboration and communi-
cation efforts between domain experts, business and functional analysts, and IT
architects. Moreover, in the effort of understanding business processes, IT ar-
chitects are confronted with the particularities - i.e. notation and semantics - of
the adopted business process modeling notation. Also, IT architects are forced
to reason in terms of process-centric abstractions, which do not necessarily fit
into the architectural abstractions, typically centered around concepts such as
object, component and service.
In this article, an approach for BDD is proposed which relies on principles of
Model-Driven Engineering (MDE). This approach aims at facilitating the align-
ment between business processes and IT solutions by means of automating the
translation from BPMN models to UML activity models. Because UML has be-
come the de-facto industry standard for modeling software systems, architectural
models of contemporary industrial solutions typically rely on its formalisms and
modeling support. We claim that re-expressing - in an automated way - the
BPMN business process models in the form of UML activity models can (i) help
improve IT architects’ understanding of those business processes, (ii) enable
the synchronization of those business processes with other architectural models
expressed in UML, (iii) relieve IT architects from having to master BPMN’s
notation and formalisms. In addition and contrary to UML, no standard BPMN
metamodel exists today which complicates BPMN’s practical adoption in the
context of MDE for BDD. The re-expression of business processes in UML can
enable the subsequent definition of model transformations that rely on the stan-
dard UML metamodel.
The main contributions of this approach are: (i) the definition of a mapping
from BPMN concepts to corresponding UML activity elements, and (ii) the
implementation of this mapping in the form of a model-to-model transformation
using ATL [8]. Defining a conceptual mapping between these two languages is
not trivial - due to their different purposes and semantics. As extra contributions,
non-straightforward mapping scenarios are identified (iii) and ATL’s features are
evaluated against the realization of those scenarios (iv).
This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 introduces BPMN and UML ac-
tivity models, Section 3 presents the proposed conceptual mapping between the
two, describing non-straightforward mapping scenarios for which ATL solutions
are proposed in Section 4. Sections 5 and 6 present related and future work
respectively, and conclusions are summarized in Section 7.