Activity Diagrams Patterns for Modeling Business Processes

Designing and analyzing business processes is the starting point of the development of enterprise applications, especially when following the SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) paradigm. UML activity diagrams are often used to model business processes. Unfortunately, their rich syntax favors mistakes by designers; furthermore, their informal semantics prevents the use of automated verification techniques. In this paper, (i) we propose activity diagram patterns for modeling business processes, (ii) we devise a modular mechanism to compose diagram fragments into a UML activity diagram, and (iii) we propose a semantics for the produced activity diagrams, formalized by colored Petri nets. Our approach guides the modeler task (helping to avoid common mistakes), and allows for automated verification.