From UML Statecharts and Collaboration Diagrams to Coloured Petri Nets Models: A Graph Transformation Based Approach for Modelling and Analysis of Business Processes in Virtual Enterprises

Virtual Enterprises can be considered as one of the most promising paradigms for future enterprises. The main characteristics of Virtual Enterprises are the distributed and parallel business process execution. UML is considered nowadays as the standardized language for object oriented modeling. However, UML needs a well-defined semantic base for its notation. Petri nets (PNs) are a formal and graphical language appropriate for systems modelling and analysis. Coloured Petri Nets (CPN) are a high level PNs formalism in which tokens are not simply blank markers, but have data associated with them. In this paper we propose an approach for business processes in Virtual Enterprises based on an integration of UML and CPN (Colored Petri Nets). UML is used for modeling and CPN formalism is used for analyzing the design prior to full system implementation. Since UML diagrams and CPN models are both graphs, the mapping between UML Diagrams and CPN models is performed automatically using graph transformation. We have used the ATOM3 tool. The proposed approach follows the Unified Process life cycle.