Animating ebXML Transactions with a Workflow Engine

ebXML is becoming the new international standard for the specification and deployment of complex B2B transactions over the internet. ebXML transactions are inherently distributed, involving many actors exchanging XML messages with each other according to complex flows and rules. This complexity hampers validation of the correctness of a modelled business transaction by business experts. To alleviate this problem, we have developed an animator to support the cooperative validation of ebXML transactions by business experts. The animator is internet-based, supporting distributed animation of an ebXML transaction. The animator automatically checks business rules on the messages exchanged during animation. Heart of the animator is a workflow engine that can read workflow descriptions in XPDL. In this paper, we show how the animator is automatically configured from the UML models describing the ebXML transaction. The main UML models used are class diagrams to model messages and an activity diagram to model the global flow of the messages that are exchanged by the actors. Class diagrams are annotated with business rules. The UML activity diagram maps into XPDL code for the workflow engine. The class diagrams map into XML Schemas that are used by the animator for receiving, checking and sending messages. The mapping algorithms have been implemented as plugins in a commercial UML-based CASE tool. Throughout the paper, we illustrate the whole approach on a real-life example.