Transforming Unstructured Cycles to Structured Cycles in Sequential Flow Graphs

Methods that allow the transformation of unstructured cyclic models to functionally equivalent specifications having only structured cycles are crucial for automatically deploying graphical business process or workflow models, e.g., in the form of Universal Modeling Language (UML) activity diagrams, to an underlying platform based on a structured programming language, e.g., the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS). We present a method based on two simple transformation rules that can be applied to any sequential model without node-splitting in case of irreducibility. We further explore the effect of different rule-selection strategies based on these two basic rules as well as three other rules which are specialization of one of them.

By: Rainer F. Hauser

Published in: RZ3624 in 2005

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