Automatic bridge between BPMN models and UML activity diagrams based on graph transformation

Abstract

Model-driven engineering (MDE) provides the available tools, concepts, and languages for creating and transforming models. One of the most important successes of MDE is model transformation, it permits the transformion of models that are used by one community to equivalent models that can be used by another one. Moreover, each community of developers has its own tools for verification, testing, and test-case generation. Hence, a developer of one community who moves to another community needs a transformation process from the second community to his/her own community and vice versa. Therefore, the target community can benefit from the expertise of the source one, and the developers do not begin from zero. In this context, we propose an automatic transformation in this paper for creating a bridge between the BPMN and UML communities. We propose an approach and a visual tool for the automatic transformation of BPMN models to UML activity diagrams (UML-AD). The proposed approach is based on meta-modeling and graph transformation and uses the AToM3 tool. Indeed, we were inspired by the OMG meta-models of BPMN and UML-AD and implemented versions of both meta-models using AToM3 . This latter one allows for the automatic generation of a visual-modeling tool for each proposed meta-model. Based on these two meta-models, we propose a graph grammar that is composed of 58 rules that perform the transformation process. The proposed approach is illustrated through three case studies.