Engineering of dependable complex business processes using UML and Coordinated Atomic Actions

Abstract

For many companies, it is widely recognized that languages and methods for modeling and analyzing distributed business processes are becoming more and more important. For improving efficiency, the modeling language should provide reusability, easy understanding by business analysts, and should ease the validation and verification tasks. In this paper, we present an approach for developing dependable complex business processes using UML that satisfies these requirements. The proposed UML notation is designed to be directly integrated with COALA, a syntactically and semantically well-defined fault-tolerant advanced transaction model based on Coordinated Atomic Actions. Structuring concepts like nested business processes and fault-tolerance through exception handling are first class concepts brought by our approach that are crucial for modeling cross-enterprise business processes. The modeling phase is followed by a validation phase by business analysts through animation of the business process model in a workflow environment. Due to the precise notation used, automatic verification of crucial properties is accessible through integration with an automatic verifier. © Springer-Verlag 2004.