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Data Transformations Using QVT Between Industrial Workflows and Business Models in BPMN2

Authors:
Corina Abdelahad
Daniel Riesco
Alessandro Carrara
Carlo Comin
Carlos Kavka

Keywords: BPMN2; business workflow; ESTECO; industrial workflow; metamodel

Abstract:
Automation of business processes (workflows) has become today a key component to support the growth of organizations. Many standards in the field of business processes, however, are not directly applicable to the field of process engineering due to specific engineering workflow requirements. The Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), a widely used notation to model business process which has been recently enhanced, allows to extend the use of workflows from the field of business process to the field of engineering. However, the large base of existing engineering workflows used currently by industry represents one of the main obstacles for the adoption of the new standards. Transformations play a pivotal role in the implementation of Model-Driven Architecture by providing a mechanism to express model refinement. Query/View/Transformation (QVT) is an OMG standard established to create queries, views and transformations of models. The QVT Relations, a component of QVT, allows to formalize model-driven transformations. ESTECO is a company which has developed a proprietary workflow modeler and an associated workflow engine. Even if its proprietary model has proven to be useful in the context of engineering processes, a standard-complaint industrial process flow will enable the building of unified and standardized models across all sectors of the business. This paper presents a model-to-model partial transformation using QVT between the ESTECO metamodel and the BPMN2 metamodel, where input data of ESTECO generates DataInputs, InputSets and IoSpecification for use in BPMN2. This transformation allows the conversion of most ESTECO industrial workflow to BPMN2, assuring portability between tools that support the BPMN2 standard.

Pages: 147 to 153

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2012

Publication date: November 18, 2012

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4235

ISBN: 978-1-61208-230-1

Location: Lisbon, Portugal

Dates: from November 18, 2012 to November 23, 2012