UML Modelling of Automated Business Processes with a Mapping to BPEL4WS

The Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) provides an XML notation and semantics for specifying business process behaviour based on Web Services. A BPEL4WS process is defined in terms of its interactions with partners. A partner may provide services to the process, require services from the process, or participate in a two-way interaction with the process. The Unified Modeling Language— (UML—) is a language, with a visual notation, for modeling software systems. The UML is an OMG— standard and is widely supported by tools. UML can be customized for use in a particular modeling context through a ‘UML profile’. We describe a UML Profile for Automated Business Processes which allows BPEL4WS processes to be modeled using an existing UML tool. We also describe a mapping to BPEL4WS which can be automated to generate web services artifacts (BPEL, WSDL, XSD) from a UML model meeting the profile.