UML Refinement for Mapping UML Activity Diagrams into BPEL Specifications to Compose Service-Oriented Workflows

The increasing requirements of today’s applications pushes developers to propose sophisticate computing solutions in terms of design notations, specification languages and deployment tools. Service-oriented computing is a good example of these efficient technologies, but it is unfortunately too difficult to handle by individual users. The aim of our work is to fully take advantage of new service-oriented platforms taking into account both users’ skills and the internal complexity of their applications. In this paper, we propose a workflow-based approach for managing applications on large-scale distributed systems. We present a hybrid framework named JASMIN, based on a refinement of UML for workflow specification and BPEL for the service composition. In addition to the role of JASMIN and its architecture, we describe a key step of the implementation of JASMIN, which is the refinement of UML activity diagrams. This refinement is useful to ease the interaction between users and the JASMIN framework. It also allows the mapping, in a transparent manner, of UML models into BPEL documents.