Process of workflow exception handling based on extended UML activity diagram

In services-oriented agile supply chain management, more and more complex business process require for automatic and flexible ability to react to the dynamic market environ- ment. In this paper, we proposed the distributed and adaptive workflow model and implementation. The workflow model focus on the BPEL4WS based workflow composition, the DAIM-S based business domain ontology, XSRL based business process monitoring and workflow performance, semantic ECA based workflow exception handling, and petri net based workflow analyzing. In the final, we proposed intelligence multi-agents based distributed and adaptive workflow model implementation. I. INTRODUCTION Business organizations confront an increased global com- petition, which forces companies to improve their efficiency and flexibility for adapting the dynamic business environment. The agility of a company's response to customer demand has been recognized as a critical success factor to meet the global competition. Agile supply chain management has become an effective and significant measure to enhance competitive advantage of modern enterprises (1)(2). To satisfy and respond quickly to the business requirements, we proposed loosing coupled services-oriented agile supply chain management ar- chitecture. At the same time, more and more complex business process require for automatic and flexible ability to react to dynamic market and strengthen their ability to compete in global business society. To meet such requirement, we pro- posed a distributed and adaptive workflow model in services- oriented agile supply chain management. In this model, we apply BPEL4WS as services workflow definition language to composite the complex business process, and discussed the DAIM-S based business domain ontology, XSRL based business process monitoring and workflow performance, se- mantic ECA based workflow exception handling, and Petri net based workflow analyzing. In the final, We also proposed the coordinated intelligent agents based distributed and adaptive workflow implementations in services-oriented agile supply chain management.

Exception handling in workflow management systems (WFMSs) is a very important problem since it is not possible to specify all possible outcomes and alternatives. Effective reuse of existing exception handlers can greatly help in dealing with workflow exceptions. On the other hand, cooperative support for user-driven resolution of unexpected exceptions and workflow evolution at runtime is vital for an adaptive WFMS. We have developed ADOME-WFMS via a meta-modeling approach as a comprehensive framework in which the problem of workflow exception handling can be adequately addressed. In this chapter, we present an overview of exception handling in ADOME-WFMS with procedures for supporting the following: reuse of exception handlers, thorough and automated resolution of expected exceptions, effective management of Problem Solving Agents, cooperative exception handling, user-driven computer supported resolution of unexpected exceptions, and workflow evolution.

Along with rapid development of workflow technology, on the market, there are a lot of workflow products. Workflow exception handling study in the exception of workflow, through the appropriate method to deal effectively with the exception to ensure the implementation of the workflow. Most existing research on workflow management systems (WFMS) has been focused on workflow based on well structured and well-behaved business processes. But it is devoid of the advisement of flexibility and uncertainty. This paper proposes an Agents group based approach for exception handling. Agents group is dispatched to find out the status of running processes in the system to keep track and troubleshoot them when necessary. This model describes the classification of workflow exception, and the corresponding design of different type of exception handing agents and their cooperation.

UML activity diagrams are the object-oriented equivalent of flow charts and data-flow diagrams from structured development (Gane and Sarson 1979). In UML 1.x, UML activity diagrams were a specialization of UML state machine diagrams, although in UML 2.x they are full-fledged artifacts. UML activity diagrams are used to explore the logic of ■ a complex operation, ■ a complex business rule, ■ a single use case, ■ several use cases, ■ a business process, ■ concurrent processes, ■ software processes. General Guidelines Place the Starting Point in the Top Left Corner A starting point is modeled with a filled circle, using the same notation that UML state chart diagrams use. Every UML activity diagram should have a starting point, and placing it at the top left corner reflects the way that people in Western cultures begin reading. Figure 41, depicting the business process of enrolling in a university, takes this approach. Another good option is to place it at the top center of the diagram. Include an Ending Point An ending point is modeled with a filled circle with a border around it. Some people's style is to make ending points optional—sometimes an activity is simply a dead end—but if this is the case, then there is no harm in indicating that the only activity edge (formerly known as a transition) is to an ending point. That way, when someone else reads your diagram, they know that you have considered how to exit these activities.

Formal modeling and verification of UML Activity Diagrams (UAD) with FoCaLiZe

UML activity and state chart diagrams are the most frequently UML models used for testing a system based on its specifications. Testers may choose different UML diagrams based on comprehensibility criteria. Previous studies, however, highlighted the lack of experts’ evaluation of comprehensibility of activity and state chart diagrams in test case generation. Thus, the main objective of this study is to evaluate the comprehensibility of the UML activity and state chart diagrams based on perspectives of experts. This study generated manual test cases from activity and state chart diagrams and used comprehensibility’s evaluation criteria during interviews with several software testing experts. The results of this study revealed that activity diagrams are more comprehensible than state chart diagrams in test case generation by considering comprehension variables (perceived difficulty and subjective confidence). The results of this study aim to unify the practical efforts of testers to choose MBT diagrams in generating test cases.

Business process modeling notations are used in requirements engineering to specify business processes that should be supported by the system under development. Comparisons of business process modeling notations with regard to their concepts do exist, but to our knowledge, little evaluation has taken place regarding their effectiveness and efficiency for typical requirements engineering tasks. Therefore, we set up experiments examining UML activity diagrams (ACTs) and event-driven process chains (EPCs) both from a requirements engineer's perspective with a focus on model creation and from a customer's or end user's perspective with a focus on model understandability. The experiments were conducted as a blocked subject-object study, where the participants had to solve several characteristic tasks. The results were then analyzed by means of statistical analysis methods. In the case of the requirements engineer, we were able to show that ACTs perform better than EPCs. In the case of the customer or end user, we cannot make a clear statement.

Because of their structural and semantic inter-dependency, UML diagrams describing a software product must be consistent to ensure the success of the development process. This inter-diagram consistency is often not easy to ensure considering the multi-views the diagrams cover, the different levels of abstraction they encode, and the different development phases during which they are produced. In this paper, we tackle the consistency problem between the functional and dynamic views in behavioral diagrams of software. We propose an approach to detect and localize inter-consistency errors among UML use cases and activity diagrams. This approach is composed of two phases: measurement phase (1) and controlling phase (2). This approach is illustrated and validated through a "Restaurant management system" case study. The proposed approach will help both software designers/developers and quality assurance/testing engineers identifying and localizing the causes of software errors at early phases (specification and design).

The Unified Enterprise Modelling Language (UEML) aims to become a hub for integrated use of enterprise and information systems (IS) models expressed using different languages. The paper explains how central constructs from UML's class and activity diagrams have been incorporated into UEML. As a result, the semantics of UML's central constructs for representing classes and activities have become more precisely defined in terms of the common UEML ontology. Through their ontology images, the two diagram types are also on the way to become interoperable with other enterprise and IS modelling languages in UEML.

Workflow management systems (WfMSs) are being increasingly deployed to deliver e-business transactions across organizational boundaries. To ensure a high service quality in such transactions, exception-handling schemes for conflict resolution are needed. The conflicts primarily arise due to failure of a task in workflow execution because of underlying application, or controlling WfMS component failures or insufficient user input. So far, little progress has been reported in addressing conflict resolution in cross-organizational business processes, though its importance has been recognized. In this paper, we identify the exception handling techniques that support conflict resolution in cross-organizational settings. In particular, we propose a novel, “bundled” exception-handling approach, which supports (1) exception knowledge sharing--sharing exception specifications and handling experiences, (2) coordinated exception handling, and (3) intelligent problem solving--using case based reasoning to reuse exception handing experiences. A prototype of this exception handling mechanism is developed and integrated as a part of the METEOR Workflow Management System. An evaluation of our approach is also presented through some sample workflow applications.

Clinical Pathways can be viewed as workflows, comprising an ordering of activities with associated execution constraints. Workflow models allow formal representation, analysis and execution of workflows in the Clinical Pathways. We present a semantic web-based approach where the domain knowledge and the workflow model are modeled separately as ontologies, while the Clinical Pathway and the associated workflows are modeled as the instantiations of these ontologies. Our workflow model is based on the UML Activity Diagrams and OWL-S service ontology, and the execution semantics are based on Place/Transition Petri Nets. We demonstrate our approach by capturing the workflow of the Prostate Cancer Care Pathway.

When solving problems such as enterprise information integration and interoperation across heterogeneous repositories, Web services and workflow are extensively used. Due to the nature of modularity, openness and encapsulation, traditional exception handling strategies can hardly meet the demands in the Web service setting. In this paper, we put forward a strategy based on constraint rules of Web services and the position of service nodes. We also design a framework to support exception handling dynamically during the execution of workflow.

This paper deals with a new technique for validating object-oriented software at design phase of project development. There are several modeling diagrams used at design phase of Software Development Life Cycle. But in this paper, we focus on UML Activity Diagram. In our work, first we construct the UML activity diagram for the given system using ArgoUML. Then, the XML (“EXtensible Markup Language”) code is generated for the constructed activity diagram. Next, this XML code is translated to XSD (“XML Schema Definition”) code. This XSD code is given as input to JAXB (“Java Architecture for XML Binding”), which generates the Java template. Then, this Java template is instrumented to a complete Java program with minimal manual effort. Next, we carryout concolic testing of this Java code using jCUTE. This tool generates test cases by taking the Java program as input. Then, the obtained test suite and generated Java source code are inputed into our in-house developed tool named COPECA (COverage PErcentage CAlculator) to calculate MC/DC (Modified Condition/Decision Coverage) score. We have achieved 56.31% MC/DC on doing experiment with fourteen activity diagrams, which is a fair (moderate) achievement compared to the existing work.

This paper presents a prioritization technique that prioritizes the test cases using different design attributes like cohesion, coupling, the number of database access, and non-functional requirements. First, the system requirements are modeled using UML activity diagram (AD). The AD is turned into activity diagram graph (ADG), and the ADG is traversed to find out the test scenarios that are identified by the linearly independent paths in the ADG. Depending upon the different design attributes, weights for each node in the graph are identified and a final priority value is assigned to each node. The nodes executed for every test are identified, the priority value (PV) of the nodes is summed up, and the test case is assigned with a final priority value. Finally, depending on the priority value, the test cases are prioritized. The efficiency of the suggested approach is evaluated using the APFD metric.

UML activity diagrams have become an established notation to model control and data ow on various levels of abstraction, ranging from fine-grained descriptions of algorithms to high-level workflow models in business applications. A formal semantics has to capture the flexibility of the interpretation of activity diagrams in real systems, which makes it inappropriate to define a fixed formal semantics. In this paper, we define a semantics with semantic variation points that allow for a customizable, application-specific interpretation of activity diagrams. We examine concrete variants of the activity diagram semantics which may also entail variants of the syntax re ecting the intended use at hand.