Business Processes Modeling through Multi Level Activity Diagrams

Denis Del Villano

, Gaetanino Paolone

and Paolino Di Felice

Department of Ingegneria Elettrica e dell'Informazione, University of L'Aquila, L'Aquila, Italy

Gruppo SI S.c.a.r.l., Teramo, Italy

Keywords: Business Modeling, UML, Activity Diagrams, Use Case, Correspondence Matrices, Double Tracing.

Abstract: The usage of UML 2.0 activity diagrams at two different levels of abstraction is proposed to consolidate an

already known business modeling approach for the development of large enterprise software applications. In

this way a high continuity between the phases of business modeling and system modeling is obtained.

Moreover, to keep a better control of the completeness of the business modeling artifacts, we recommend to

fill out matrices that make explicit the link among business activities, business use cases and business

objects involved in the automation of the information system.

1 INTRODUCTION

The RUP oriented and Use Case centred

methodology described in (Paolone et al., 2008a;

2008b; 2009; 2010a; 2010b), currently under use

within Gruppo S.I. (www.softwareindustriale.it), is

appropriate for the modeling of enterprise

information systems when the goal is to automate

one of its subsystems. We borrowed such a

modeling and development methodology

computerize workflows of a network of banks. The

peculiarity of such a scenario is the existence, within

the enterprise, of the underlying information

system.

This situation makes natural to carry out the

business modeling phase (of subsystems) of the

enterprise in terms of Business UCs

and classes of

Business Objects, as well as the description of the

internal and external information flows.

The everyday experience teaches that, besides

the automation of enterprise subsystems, often it

arises the necessity of:

a) re-engineering (part of) the enterprise

organization before proceeding to its

automation in order, for instance, to either

improve the information flows or to introduce

process innovation;

b) designing from the beginning the information

system of a new enterprise, before proceeding

to its automation.

In both those situations, the just mentioned

methodological approach presents shortcomings due

to the fact that, being UC centred, it is not suitable

for the representation of the processes. The goal of

this paper is to suggest a way to strengthen such a

modeling approach at the business level, so that it

may become applicable with the same effectiveness

also to the mentioned cases “a.” and “b.”.

Today, several notations for describing business

processes are available: BPMN, Petri-nets, BPEL,

UML Activity Diagrams, Data Flow Diagrams, etc.

Among them, a leading position is held by BPMN

(BPMN, 2012) to which, lately, came abreast UML

(e.g., (UML, 2012; Johnston, 2004)).

Research has been done to formally compare the

expressiveness of BPMN Business Process Diagrams

against UML ADs with respect to their suitability to

serve as a business processes modeling formalism

(e.g., (Russel et al., 2006)). The final outcome was

that those notations are basically equivalent.

However, there is an important difference between

them and it concerns the target users of the diagrams.

BPMN Business Process Diagrams are more oriented

to business stakeholders than to system ones, a

category, this latter, equally important when the goal

is to move from business modeling to system

modeling. That’s why, in this paper, we embrace the

choice of UML as the common modeling language

between business and technical stakeholders.

The present paper is organized as follows. Sec.2

recalls the basic elements of the methodology

described in (Paolone et al., 2008a; 2008b; 2009;

2010a; 2010b) in order to provide the reader with the

minimal background necessary to understand the

present proposal. Sec.3 focuses on the proposal.

Basic elements of the contribution concern the

195

Del Villano D., Paolone G. and Di Felice P..

Business Processes Modeling through Multi Level Activity Diagrams.

DOI: 10.5220/0003986201950198

In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering (ENASE-2012), pages 195-198

ISBN: 978-989-8565-13-6

 2012 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

adoption of the UML 2.0 ADs to model, at two

different levels of abstraction, the business processes

of the system to be computerized, and what we call

correspondence matrices, offering a global view of

all the underlying business activities, BUCs, BUC

realizations and BOs being part of the artifacts

carried out during the business modeling. Sec.4

touches on an example helpful to instantiate the

ideas sketched in Sec.3.

2 THE BACKGROUND

The final goal of the research described in (Paolone

et al., 2008a; 2008b; 2009; 2010a; 2010b) is to

define a UC

centred methodology, together with a

supporting developing tool, ensuring the continuity

between business modeling, system modeling,

design, and implementation according to the model-

driven paradigm. Their method is structured into

four distinct phases (Fig.1).

Figure 1: A sketch of the four methodological phases.

The first two phases concern business modeling,

while the remaining two concern system modeling.

The business modeling activity starts from the

detection of the organization units involved in the IT

project, then it proceeds to the discovery of their

Business Systems. Inside every BS, we identify

Business UCs and BUC Realizations.

During system analysis, a double trace operation

is accomplished (Fig.1) to map to the system

perspective BUCs and BUCRs, which become the

SUCs and SUCRs, respectively. The logic behind

the trace remains unaltered with respect to the

classical RUP: in the system view, only the UCs that

will be automated will be taken into consideration.

3 THE PROPOSAL

If the business analyst can rely on an existing and

well designed information system, then he has to

analyze the working context and proceed to the

discovery of the BOs and the BUCs. But, if he has to

either design or re-engineer the business (points “a.”

and “b.” of Sec.1.), then he has to proceed

differently. In fact, in those cases, it is necessary to

make use of UML constructs suitable to represent

the information flows, the business processes, and

the relationships existing among them, as well. To

extend the usability of the methodology by Paolone

and his colleagues to those situations, we propose to

model the business processes of the system to be

computerized in terms of UML ADs used at two

different levels of abstraction. Hereinafter, we

discuss such two modeling levels, in sequence.

At the initial stage of the business modeling, by

means of the ADs it is possible to define the

business processes and, hence, the information flows

of the system to be computerized, whether it exists,

or it has to be re-engineered in some of its

subsystems, or it has to be developed from scratch.

Each business process can be modeled in terms of

one or more ADs.

The business modeling of real systems brings to

the construction of manifold artifacts collecting

business activities, BUCs and BOs. As their number

and complexity increase, it becomes difficult to keep

a global view of the project progress. This increases

the risk that the completeness in the identification of

the "elements" composing them cannot be reached.

We managed the complexity by collecting in a

matrix of dimension nxm (hereinafter called

BActivity-BUC correspondence matrix - C1) all the

business activities, BUCs and BOs part of the

artifacts carried out, as soon as they are

accomplished.

Matrix C1 collects the business activities (the

rows) and the BUCs (the columns): to carry out 1

business activity it may require from 1 to m BUCs,

while 1 BUC concurs in the achievement of 1 to n

activities. The generic element of C1 denotes the set

of BOs involved in the BUC

in connection with the

BActivity

, that is:

C1[BActivity

, BUC

]={BO

, BO

,…, BO

If BUC

is not involved in the BActivity

, then

such a set is empty. A BO may be involved in

several BUCs. Fig.2 shows an example.

ENASE2012-7thInternationalConferenceonEvaluationofNovelSoftwareApproachestoSoftwareEngineering

196

Figure 2: An instance of matrix C1.

Real life projects emphasized the usefulness to

complement the narrative specification of “complex”

BUCs (i.e., those that give rise to at least three

BUCRs) in order to formally detail the logic of the

underlying process in terms of atomic actions. For

each detailed process, it may be necessary up to n

ADs.

For each BUC, we suggest to fill in a DActivity-

BUCR correspondence matrix (C2) - same reasons

as for C1 - (where DActivity stands for Detailed

Activity, that is an activity that denotes elementary

business operations. Examples are given in Sec.4) of

dimension p

xq among the detailed activities (the

rows) and the BUCRs (the columns) that realize the

selected BUC: to carry out 1 detailed activity it may

require from 1 to q BUCRs, while 1 BUCR concurs

in the achievement of 1 to p detailed activities. The

generic element of C2 denotes the set of BOs

involved in the BUCR

in connection with the

DActivity

, that is:

C2[DActivity

, BUCR

]={BO

, BO

,…, BO

If BUCR

is not involved in the DActivity

, then

such a set is empty. A BO may be involved in

several BUCRs. Fig.3 shows an example.

Figure 3: An instance of matrix C2 for a generic BUC.

Matrices C2, referring to an abstraction level

lower than that of C1, may accommodate additional

BOs with respect to those listed in C1. In the

examples of Fig.2 and Fig.3, BO

is the extra BO

that arises.

4 A REAL-LIFE EXAMPLE

The business and system modeling approach of

Sec.2, and integrated with ADs (Sec.3), was applied

to the design of a documentary management system

for the BCC of Vomano bank, part of the Central

Institute of Rural and Artisan Banks circuit.

At the initial stage of the business analysis, we

carried out, in close collaboration with the bank top

management, the definition of the corporate

information system. 7 BSs were detected and

analyzed: in the example discussed hereinafter, we

focus on one of them: the BS

DocumentaryManagement. The BCC bank adheres to

the Green Economy vision. To design an

information system oriented to the Green Banking it

is mandatory to adopt a documentary management

system allowing to reset the circulation of paper-

based documents within the bank.

For each identified BS, the pertinent business

processes were enucleated and modeled through

high level of abstraction UML ADs (Sec.3). In this

section, we will refer to the business process

DocumentDematerialization of the

DocumentaryManagement BS. Fig.4 shows the

corresponding AD that describes the logic of such a

business process in terms of a certain number of not-

atomic actions. The

DocumentAcquisition activity,

for instance, denotes the set of atomic actions

needed to file a document in the system.

Figure 4: An AD at a high level of abstraction.

For the 7 BSs of the BCC of Vomano, 22 BUCs

were detected and 15 high level of abstraction ADs

were realized. Fig.5 shows the portion of matrix C1

concerning the 4 business activities of Fig.4 and the

pertinent BUCs. Those BUCs are part of the

business UC model (Johnston, 2004) not shown here

because of space limits. Among the listed BUCs, the

most complex is

DocumentAcquisition realized by

5 BUCRs (Fig.6). The narrative specification of the

DocumentAcquisition BUC was complemented by

4 detailed ADs, each modeling the detailed logic of

the BUC in terms of atomic actions. Two of them

are shown in Fig.7, where, for instance, the

Document’sTemplateSelection represents an

atomic action. Fig.8 shows the portion of C2

regarding the ADs of Fig.7.

C1=

BUC

BActivity

{BO

}

BActivity

{BO

}

{BO

}

C2 =

BUCR

DActivity

{BO

}

{BO

}

DActivity

{BO

}

BusinessProcessesModelingthroughMultiLevelActivityDiagrams

197

Figure 5: A partial instance of the BActivity-BUC correspondence matrix (C1).

Figure 6: DocumentAcquisition realization diagram.

Figure 7: Two detailed ADs.

Figure 8: A partial instance of the DActivity-BUCR correspondence matrix (C2).

REFERENCES

BPMN, 2012. Business Process Model and Notation,

Version 2.0 (www.bpmn.org/)

Johnston S., 2004. Rational UML Profile for business

modeling. IBM Rational. (www.ibm.com/developer

works/rational/library/)

Kruchten, P., 2003. Rational Unified Process, An

Introduction. Addison-Wesley, 2

edition, UK.

Paolone, G. et al., 2008a. A methodology for building

enterprise Web 2.0 Applications. 10

Int. Conf. on the

Modern Information Technology in the Innovation

Processes of the Industrial Enterprises.

Paolone, G. et al., 2008b. Design and Development of web

2.0 Applications. 5

Conf. of the Italian Chapter of the

Association for Information Systems.

Paolone, G. et al., 2009a. Web 2.0 Applications: model-

driven tools and design. 6

Conf. of the Italian

Chapter of the AISs.

Paolone, G. et al., 2010a. A Business Use Case driven

methodology: a step Forward. 5

Int. Conf. on

Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software

Engineering.

Paolone, G. et al., 2010b. Use case double tracing linking

business modeling to software development. 7

Conf.

of the Italian Chapter of the AISs.

Russell, N. et al., 2006. On the suitability of UML 2.0

activity diagrams for business process modeling. 3

Asia-Pacific Conf. on Conceptual Modelling.

Conferences in Research and Practice in Information

Technology, Vol. 53. M. Stumptner, S. Hartmann and

Y. Kiyoki, Eds.

UML, 2012. Unified Modeling Language, Version 2.4.1,

(www.uml.org/)

ENASE2012-7thInternationalConferenceonEvaluationofNovelSoftwareApproachestoSoftwareEngineering

198