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Astract: Today, most approaches for inter-organizational business processes start bottom-up from the interfaces and the workflows of each partner described on the IT layer. Alternatively, one may start from the commitments and agreements between business partners to reach their complementary business goals. The latter approach is target of the UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology (UMM), which models a global choreography. In a model driven approach the UMM artifacts must be further elaborated toward an IT solution for each participating business partner. For this purpose we have developed a UML profile to model a local choreography or an orchestration that respects the agreements made in the global choreography. In order to execute the local choreography / orchestration in the local IT, the processes must be machine-readable. For this purpose we demonstrate a transformation to the business process execution language (WS-BPEL).

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Astract: In this paper, we report our experiences on teaching the Unifi ed Modeling Language in the large. More precisely, about 1000 computer science and business informatics students attend our course Object-Oriented Modeling each year. Requiring a profound understanding of the UML, many advanced courses like Software Engineering or Model Engineering build on the knowledge imparted by our course. In order to achieve our ambitious teaching targets, we establish personal mentoring despite the mass enhanced with e-learning facilities.

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Astract: The development of complex software systems requires appropriate abstraction mechanisms in terms of model-driven engineering techniques (MDE) and proper support for allowing developers to work in parallel in terms of version control systems (VCSs). For realizing the vision of MDE, a bundle of standards has been made available recently, whereas the versioning of models has not gained the necessary attention yet, although being of paramount importance for the success of MDE in practice. In this paper, we propose a first vision of AMOR (Adaptable Model Versioning) to leverage version control in the area of MDE. The innovations of AMOR are threefold. Firstly, AMOR supports precise conflict detection, i.e., previously undetected as well as wrongly indicated conflicts shall be avoided. Secondly, AMOR focuses on intelligent conflict resolution by providing techniques for the representation of conflicting modifications as well as suggesting proper resolution strategies. Thirdly, AMOR targets an adaptable versioning framework, empowering modelers to flexibly balance between reasonable adaptation effort and proper versioning support while ensuring generic applicability to various domain-specific modeling languages and associated tools.

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Astract: Workflow technology promises an increase in efficiency in the execution of business processes. The technology is widely accepted, but often the high costs exceed the promised benefits. This is due to the fact that companies do not carefully select the business processes for automation by workflow management systems (WFMS). They also implement processes that have an unappropriate structures for automation and/or that are economically irrelevant. This paper presents an evaluation framework that enables a selection of appropriate business processes. Currently there does not exist any suitable evaluation framework. The framework considers criteria for technical feasibility, economic potential and organizational aspects. The scoring model based on these criteria follows a multi factor analysis and leads to a process-automation portfolio enabling the selection of appropriate business processes. The framework has been successfully used in the IT company of an banking corporation.

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Astract: This paper presents SemAnt, a distributed content-based routing algorithm based on the Ant Colony Optimization meta-heuristic and adapted for deployment in peer-to-peer networks. Under the assumption that the shared content in the network is annotated according to a taxonomy, it is possible to determine the hierarchical relationships between queries, and to exploit this information to improve the routing process. The experimental results presented in this paper show that the performance of content-based peer-to-peer search is highly dependent on the content distribution in the network and on the network's topology. It can be improved by exploiting the information provided by the underlying taxonomy. The degree of improvement is proportional to the degree of coherence in the content distribution.

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Astract: The United Nation's Center for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) is a standardization body known for its work on UN/EDIFACT and ebXML. One of its most recent developments is UN/CEFACT's Modeling Methodology (UMM). The UMM standard is used to model inter-organizational business processes in the B2B domain. With the increasing availability of electronic governmental services over networks, the frontier between B2B and B2G/G2G disappears. Today one expects a governmental institution to react like any other business partner. Therefore also governments now face the interoperability and compatibility issues as regular businesses do. In order to allow two governmental institutions to collaborate, a methodology uniquely depicting the inter-organizational process from a global perspective is needed. In this paper we propose to use UN/CEFACT's Modeling Methodology in the eGovernment domain. UMM allows the definition of a global choreography which is then being used to derive local orchestrations for each business partner. Such orchestrations can then be used by enterprise applications in a service oriented context. As an example, a real-world scenario from the waste transport domain within the European Union will be shown. Furthermore the possible integration in the context of the We-Go project [3] is examined.

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Astract: Model transformations are playing a vital role in the field of model engineering. However, for non-trivial transformation issues most approaches require imperative definitions, which are cumbersome and error-prone to create. Therefore, Model Transformation By Example (MTBE) approaches have been proposed as user-friendly alternative that simplifies the definition of model transformations. Up to now, MTBE approaches have been applied to structural models, only. In this work we apply MTBE to the domain of business process modeling languages, i.e., Event-driven Process Chains and UML activity diagrams. Compared to structural languages, business process modeling languages cover static semantic constraints, which are not specified in the metamodel. As a consequence, reasoning on the abstract syntax level is not sufficient. The contribution of this paper is to extend our existing MTBE approach by new alignment operators on the user level, which further improves the transparency of model transformation code. Concrete syntax and the knowledge about mapping operators are to be the only requisite artifacts.

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Astract: Aspect-orientation provides a new way of modularization by clearly separating crosscutting concerns from non-crosscutting ones. While aspect-orientation originally has emerged at the programming level, it now stretches also over other development phases. There are, for example, already several proposals to Aspect-Oriented Modeling (AOM), most of them pursuing distinguished goals, providing different concepts as well as notations, and showing various levels of maturity. Consequently, there is an urgent need for both, academia and practice, to provide an in-depth survey, clearly identifying commonalities and differences between current AOM approaches. Existing surveys in this area focus more on comprehensibility with respect to development phases or evaluated approaches rather than on comparability at a fine-grained level. This paper tries to fill this gap. As a prerequisite for an in-depth evaluation, a conceptual reference model is presented, capturing the basic concepts of AOM and their interrelationships in terms of a UML class diagram. Based on this conceptual reference model, an evaluation framework has been designed by deriving a detailed and well-defined catalog of evaluation criteria. The actual evaluation by means of this criteria catalog and by employing a running example is done on the basis of a carefully selected set of eight AOM approaches, each of them having already reached a certain level of maturity. This per approach evaluation is complemented with an extensive report on lessons learned, summarizing the approaches´ strengths and shortcomings.

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