Transforming object-oriented to process-oriented models

Abstract

Object-oriented modelling is an established approach to document the information systems. In an object model,
a system is captured in terms of object types and associations, state machines, collaboration diagrams, etc. Process modeling on the other hand, provides a different approach whereby behaviour is captured in terms of activities, flow dependencies, resources, etc. These
two approaches have their relative advantages. In
object models, behaviour is split across object types, whereas in process models, behaviour is captured along chains of
logically related tasks. Also, object models and process models lend
themselves to different styles of implementation. There is an
opportunity to leverage the relative advantages of object models and
process models by creating integrated meta-models and
transformations so that modellers can switch between these views. In
this paper we define a transformation from a meta-model for object
behavior modeling to a meta-model for process modeling. The
transformation relies on the identification of causal
relations in the object model. These relations are encoded in a
heuristics net from which a process model is derived.