Translating BPMN models into UML activities

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 collaboration 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 models with other UML architectural models is enabled. In addition, architects 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. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.