A Framework for Integrating ESL Tools - IRIT

2 Pierre-Yves Pillain, Joel Champeau, Hanh Nhi Tran
To remedy the deficiency of software process enactment mechanisms, there were
attempts to benefit from the execution features implemented in business process
engineering tools to enact software process models (for instance, the works in [1][2] or
the suggestion in [9]). However, for dealing with software and system processes, which
are usually very complex and unstable, the execution mechanism provided by business
management process systems seems inadequate. Generally software processes concern
with several iterations, several versions of products and use many development tools.
Workflow systems support well the tasks sequencing in processes, but they are not
equipped with necessary constructs to allow a tight controlling of software development
activities, e.g. for managing and validating software artifacts or for integrating
development tools. Therefore, we believe that proper mechanisms for software process
enactment are necessary and should be more investigated.
Our objective is to develop a process centered environment that support Model Based
Engineering (MBE) processes. Such an environment should provide tightly interwoven
modeling and enacting modules in order to enable a coherent management of process
definition and execution. In the previous work [7], we proposed the process modeling
language MODAL, a SPEM2.0 [9] extension dedicated to specify MBE processes. In
this work, we propose the extensions to MODAL and implement the necessary
mechanisms to enact MODAL process models. To enable MODAL process’ execution,
first we added to MODAL the concepts allowing modeling the behaviors of activities
and process components. We also modified the Java Cometa Framework [7], an
extension of MARTE [11] that abstracts hardware platforms to communication models,
to take into account the support for process enactment. Then, we defined a
transformation converting a MODAL process model to a Cometa program in order to
generate the process’s executable code. This transformation is integrated and realized in
a process engine prototype which allows loading MODAL process models, instantiating
them into process instances and then executing different process instances.
In the next section we present the main concepts of MODAL process modeling
language and the extensions made to describe process execution models. In Section 3
we explain our approach to support the execution of MODAL process models.
Section 4 presents the process engine prototype being developed together with a case
study illustrating and validating our propositions. In the conclusion, we give some
brief discussions on related works, and on our ongoing works
2 MODAL Process Modeling Language
MODAL (Model Oriented Development Application Language) [14] is a SPEM 2.0
based process modeling language which introduces additional concepts enabling
“Model Based Engineering” (MBE) process definition and elicitation and reinforces
the semantics of process models to enable some degree of process executability. In
this section, first we outline the philosophy and contributions of MODAL, then we
present the main MODAL concepts needed to describe executable process models.
The detail description of MODAL can be found in [14]. Fig. 1 shows a fragment of
the metamodel representing the main MODAL concepts.
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