Survey of UML Based XPDL Document for Business Process Modeling

Abstract

Currently there are a variety of different tools that may be used to analyze, model, describe and document a business process. However, it is difficult to exchange the information of a business process created in different tools because of the distinct information formats used in different tools. The XML Process Definition Language(XPDL) of the Workflow Management Coalition(WfMC) forms a common interchange standard that enables products to continue to support arbitrary internal representations of process definitions with an import or export function to map to or from the standard at the product boundary. Generally a business process model can be represented by the UML activity diagram, but there is a difficult task to directly generate an XPDL document from a business process model represented by the standard activity diagram. In the paper we will propose an approach to generate an XPDL document from a business process model represented by the extended UML activity diagram and provide an implementation for the approach.