Business modelling for component systems with UML

The EC funded COMBINE Project has the objective of dramatically improving software development productivity by providing a holistic approach to component-based development of enterprise systems. It has a single, cohesive UML based modelling environment for all development stages. Business modelling is key to user satisfaction, business flexibility and survival. Today, some IT services are so crucial to a business that, without them, things do not just happen less well, they do not happen at all, with disastrous consequences. Business models must do more than provide the starting point for system models-they must become an integral part of a system model, from which code is generated. "Traditional" business modelling is generally done using modelling concepts and tools that are not optimised to linking to a system model. The COMBINE Project has overcome this problem in two ways-identifying a coherent minimum set of modelling concepts and discovering a way of representing these in UML. This had to be done in a way that allowed models to be equally comprehensible to business experts and system modellers. The paper describes the COMBINE Team's approach to these problems, covering the structure of a business model, a minimum set of modelling concepts, use of UML "out of the box" and showing how a business model can be structured to provide the mapping between real world business concepts and software artifacts.