EFFICIENT: a tool set for supporting the modelling and validation of ebXML

ABSTRACT

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 a tool set, consisting of a CASE tool for modelling ebXML transactions and an animator for validating the modelled transactions. At the specification level, 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 (companies). The animator is internet-based, thus supporting distributed animation of an ebXML transaction. The animator checks business rules on the messages exchanged during animation. Moreover, the animator annotates messages with possible responses. Heart of the animator is a workflow engine that can read workflow descriptions in XPDL. The animator is configured automatically from the UML specification models. We illustrate the whole approach on a real-life example.

REFERENCES

• 1: A. Grau and M. Kowsari. A validation system for object oriented specifications of information systems. In Proc. of the First East-European Symposium on Advances in Databases and Information Systems (ADBIS'97), pages 249--256, 1997.
• 2: David Harel , Amir Pnueli , Hagi Lachover , Amnon Naamad , Michal Politi , Rivi Sherman , Aharon Shtull-Trauring , Mark Trakhtenbrot, STATEMATE: A Working Environment for the Development of Complex Reactive Systems, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.16 n.4, p.403-414, April 1990 [doi>10.1109/32.54292]
• 3: P. Heymans and E. Dubois. Scenario-based techniques for supporting the elaboration and the validation of formal requirements. Requirements Engineering Journal, 3(4):202--208, 1998.
• 4: C. Huemer, Defining Electronic Data Interchange Transactions with UML, Proceedings of the 34th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences ( HICSS-34)-Volume 7, p.7031, January 03-06, 2001
• 5: Jeff Magee , Nat Pryce , Dimitra Giannakopoulou , Jeff Kramer, Graphical animation of behavior models, Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on Software engineering, p.499-508, June 04-11, 2000, Limerick, Ireland [doi>10.1145/337180.337368]
• 6: Wolfgang Meier, eXist: An Open Source Native XML Database, Revised Papers from the NODe 2002 Web and Database-Related Workshops on Web, Web-Services, and Database Systems, p.169-183, October 07-10, 2002
• 7: MIT process handbook. http://ccs.mit.edu/ph.
• 8: Christian Nentwich , Licia Capra , Wolfgang Emmerich , Anthony Finkelstein, xlinkit: a consistency checking and smart link generation service, ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT), v.2 n.2, p.151-185, May 2002 [doi>10.1145/514183.514186]
• 9: No Magic, Inc. MagicDraw. URL: http://www.magicdraw.com.
• 10: RosettaNet. Guide to RosettaNet Specifications, 1999. URL: http://www.rosettanet.org.
• 11: Jawed I. Siddiqi , Ian C. Morrey , Chris R. Roast , Mehmet B. Ozcan, Towards quality requirements via animated formal specifications, Annals of Software Engineering, 3, p.131-155, 1997
• 12: The UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology (UMM). URL: http://www.diffuse.org/ebXML.html.
• 13: UN/CEFACT and OASIS. ebXML. URL: http://www.ebxml.org.
• 14: Workflow Management Coalition. Workflow process definition interface-- XML process definition language, 2002. WFMC document WFMC-TC-1025. URL: http://www.wfmc.org.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.2 Design Tools and Techniques

General Terms:
Design, Languages, Verification

Keywords:
animation, ebXML