Interoperability of BPMN and MAML for Model-Driven Development of Business Apps

Rieger Christoph

Abstract
With process models widely used as means for documentation and monitoring of business activities, the conversion into executable software often still remains a manual and time-consuming task. The MAML framework was developed to ease the creation of mobile business apps by jointly modeling process, data, and user interface perspectives in a graphical, process-oriented model for subsequent code generation. However, this domain-specific notation cannot benefit from existing process knowledge which is often encoded in BPMN models. The purpose of this paper is to analyze conceptual differences between both notations from a software development perspective and provide a solution for interoperability through a model-to-model transformation. Therefore, workflow patterns identified in previous research are used to compare both notations. A conceptual mapping of supported concepts is presented and technically implemented using a QVT-O transformation to demonstrate an automated mapping between BPMN and MAML. Consequently, it is possible to simplify the automatic generation of mobile apps by reusing processes specified in BPMN.