Automatic Bridge between BPMN Models and UML Activity Diagrams based on Graph Transformation

Model Driven Engineering (MDE) provides available tools, concepts and languages to create and transform models. One of the most important successes of MDE is model transformation; it permits transforming models used by one community to equivalent models used by another one. Moreover, each community of developers has its own tools for verification, testing and test case generation. Hence, a developer of one community who moves to work with another community needs a transformation process from the second community to (his/her) own community and vice versa. Therefore, the target community can benefit from the expertise of the source one and the developers do not begin from zero.In this context, we propose in this paper an automatic transformation to create a bridge between the BPMN and UML communities. We propose an approach and a visual tool for the automatic transformation of BPMN models to UML Activity Diagrams (UML-AD). The proposed approach is based on Meta-Modeling and Graph Transformation, and uses the AToM3 tool. Indeed, we were inspired by the OMG meta-models of BPMN and UML-AD and implemented versions of both meta-models using AToM3. This last allows generating automatically a visual modeling tool for each proposed meta-model. Based on these two meta-models, we propose a graph grammar composed of sixty rules that perform the transformation process. The proposed approach is illustrated through three case studies

A High-level Petri Net Based Approach for Modeling and Composition of Web Services

AbstractWeb services are modular, self-describing, self-contained and loosely coupled applications, which intercommuni-cate via messages exchanging. The evolution of the internet and the emergence of new technologies like e-business have influenced the use of these last ones, which have become popular. The composition of web services is a topic that attracts the interest of researchers. It offers complex problems process ability even with simple existing web services while cooperating with each other. However, modeling tools and formal techniques for the completion of this task are required.In this paper, we show how simple existing web services can be composed, in order to create a composite service, which offers new features. In this context, we propose an expressive object-oriented Petri net based algebra that succeeds in the complex composition of Web services

A Graph Transformation Approach for Modeling and Verification of UML 2.0 Sequence Diagrams

Unified Modeling Language (UML) 2.0 Sequence Diagrams (UML 2.0 SD) are used to describe interactions in software systems. These diagrams must be verified in the early stages of software development process to guarantee the production of a reliable system. However, UML 2.0 SD lack formal semantics as all UML specifications, which makes their verification difficult, especially if we are modeling a critical system where the automation of verification is necessary. Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) is a formal specification language that is suited for analysis and has many automatic verification tools. Thus, UML and CSP have complementary aspects, which are modeling and analysis. Recently, a formalization of UML 2.0 SD using CSP has been proposed in the literature; however, no automation of that formalization exists. In this paper, we propose an approach on the basis of the above formalization and a visual modeling tool to model and automatically transform UML 2.0 SD to CSP ones; thus, the existing CSP model checker can verify them. This approach aims to use UML 2.0 SD for modeling and CSP and its tools for verification. This approach is based on graph transformation, which uses AToM3 tool and proposes a metamodel of UML 2.0 SD and a graph grammar to perform the mapping of the latter into CSP. Failures-Divergence Refinement (FDR) is the model checking tool used to verify the behavioral properties of the source model transformation such as deadlock, livelock and determinism. The proposed approach and tool are illustrated through a case study

STRUCTURAL VALIDATION OF SOFTWARE PRODUCT LINE VARIANTS: A GRAPH TRANSFORMATIONS BASED APPROACH

ABSTRAC

Mobile Agent-Based Software Systems Modeling Approaches: A Comparative Study

Mobile agent-based applications are special type of software systems which take the advantages of mobile agents in order to provide a new beneficial paradigm to solve multiple complex problems in several fields and areas such as network management, e-commerce, e-learning, etc. Likewise, we notice lack of real applications based on this paradigm and lack of serious evaluations of their modeling approaches. Hence, this paper provides a comparative study of modeling approaches of mobile agent-based software systems. The objective is to give the reader an overview and a thorough understanding of the work that has been done and where the gaps in the research are

Checking Behavioural Compatibility in Service Composition with Graph Transformation

The success of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) largely depended on the success of automatic service composition. Dynamic service selection process should ensure full compatibility between the services involved in the composition. This compatibility must be both on static proprieties, called interface compatibility which can be easily proved and especially on behavioural compatibility that needs composability checking of basic services. In this paper, we propose (1) a formalism for modelling composite services using an extension of the Business Process (BP) modelling approach proposed by Benatallah et al. and (2) a formal verification approach of service composition. This approach uses the Graph Transformation (GT) methodology as a formal verification tool. It allows behavioural compatibility verification of two given services modelled by their BPs, used as the source graph in the GT operation. The idea consists of (1) trying to dynamically generate a graph grammar R (a set of transformation rules) whose application generates the composite service, if it exists, in this case (2) the next step consist in checking the deadlock free in the resulting composite service. To this end we propose an algorithm that we have implemented using the AGG, an algebraic graph transformation API environment under eclipse IDE.070