A MODEL-DRIVEN SOLUTION FOR THE AUTOMATIC GENERATION OF EXECUTABLE CODE FROM BUSINESS PROCESS MODELS

JAVIER FABRA; VALERIA DE CASTRO; VERÓNICA A. BOLLATI; PEDRO ÁLVAREZQ; ESPERANZA MARCOS MARTINEZ

HANDBOOK OF RESEARCH ON EMERGING ADVANCEMENTS AND TECHNOLOGIES IN SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

IGI Global

Lugar: Hershey; Año: 2014; p. 211 - 251

The business goals of an enterprise process are traced to business process models with the aim of being carried out during the execution stage. The automatic translation from these models to fully executable code that can be simulated and round-trip engineered is still an open challenge in the Business Process Management field. Model-driven Engineering has proposed a set of methodologies to solve the existing gap between business analysts and software developers, but the expected results have not been achieved yet. In order to solve this challenge, in this paper we propose a solution based on the integration of three previous proposals: SOD-M, DENEB, and MeTAGem. On the one hand, SOD-M is a model-driven method for the development of service-oriented systems. Business analysts can use SOD-M to transform their business goals into composition service models, a type of model that represents business processes. On the other hand, DENEB is a platform for the development and execution of flexible business processes, represented by means of workflow models. Our approach focuses on the automatic transformation of SOD-M models to DENEB workflow models, resulting in a business process that is coded by a class of high-level Petri-nets and it is directly executable in DENEB. The model transformation process has been automated using the MeTAGen tool, which generates automatically the set of ATL rules required to transform SOD-M models to DENEB workflows. Finally, the integration of the three proposals has been illustrated by means of a real system related to the management of medical images.