MINERVA: Model drIveN and sErvice oRiented framework for the continuous business process improVement & relAted tools

Tools Dimension

Overview

To support the definitions within MINERVA framework, a first selection of existing tools is given. The aim of MINERVA framework is to integrate free existing tools facilitating the development using the Business Process Service Oriented Methodology (BPSOM) where for every activity a tool is recommended for its realization, as shown in Fig. 1. 

• Business Process Modeling (Design & Analysis phase)

  In the first place we use Oryx BPMN2 modeler for business process modeling with BPMN2 (OMG,2011), which is a web modeler providing several BPMN2 features such as saving the model in BPMN2 format. Other modelers that also allow this can be used, such as Activiti Modeler or jBPM5 designer.

   

• Service Oriented Development (Configuration phase)

  For the software oriented development we are working with an integrated selection of tools available in the Eclipse IDE providing our own Eclipse MINERVA design distribution, as we want to provide free use of the framework, integrating: Medini QVT Eclipse plug-in for QVT (OMG, 2008) transformations from business process to service models, Eclipse SoaML plug-in for SoaML (OMG,2009) modeling, Eclipse iS4BPe (insert Services for BP execution) plug-in to insert invocations to generated services into the BPMN2/XPDL/BPEL model, and the MDA engine from ModelPro Eclipse plug-in for code generation (JEE, WS) (optionally) or the Eclipse JEE distribution for manually implementing services from SoaML models.

   

• Business Process Execution (Enactment phase)

  We have evaluated several open source and community edition process engines, from which we have selected one for each execution language (BPMN2, XPDL, WS-BPEL) which were assessed by means of the realization of a case study. The process engine selected are: for BPMN2 Activiti (jBPM5 can be also used), for XPDL Bonita and for WS-BPEL Intalio community edition.

   

• Business Process Evaluation (Evaluation phase)

  For evaluating the execution of BPs we use the ProM framework and its several analysis plug-ins, and we are currently developing our own ProM BPEMM plug-in to be able to show and visualize the measurement results provided by means of the execution measures in BPEMM, which will be available for download soon.

Fig. 1. MINERVA tools support for MINERVA method of work

Key Publications:

• Delgado, A., García - Rodríguez de Guzmán, I., Ruiz, F., Piattini, M.: "Tool support for Service Oriented development from Business Processes, 2nd International Workshop on Model-Driven Service Engineering (MOSE’10), in conjunction with the 48th International Conference on Objects, Models, Components, Patterns (TOOLS'10), Accessible onl-ine: Internet Proc. of the 2nd International Workshop on Model-Driven Service Engineering (MoSE 2010), CEUR Workshop Procs., ISSN 1613-0073, http://CEUR-WS.org/Vol-608/paper3.pdf, Málaga, Spain, June (2010).

 Author: Andrea Delgado 2010