Object Life Cycle Explorer for WebSphere Business Modeler

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Update: September 11, 2008

What is Object Life Cycle Explorer for WebSphere Business Modeler?

Process modeling has proven to be an essential tool for the analysis, design, and implementation of applications that automate business process logic. As part of achieving a business goal, a business process typically manipulates several business objects, transforming their states as the process progresses. Understanding the complete state evolution of a single business object is often required for monitoring, governance, and compliance purposes, but eliciting such object life cycle information correctly from complex process models can be challenging. Object Life Cycle Explorer for WebSphere® Business Modeler alleviates this problem by allowing one to analyze and design an application from both the process and the object life cycle perspectives.

This technology is a set of plug-ins for WebSphere Business Modeler, a tool that natively supports modeling of business processes, business objects (referred to as business items), resources, etc. WebSphere Business Modeler 6.1 also allows the user to define a set of possible states for a business item and associate states with object flows in a process model. Object Life Cycle Explorer for WebSphere Business Modeler complements this functionality with the following features:

• Object life cycle modeling and visualization allow the user to associate state transition diagrams with business items in order to represent their life cycles. An object life cycle can also be viewed as a state transition table, which is more suitable for exploring complex life cycles.
• Extraction of object life cycles from process models generates object life cycle models capturing state evolution of business items across selected process models. Several options for traversal of subprocesses are provided in order to produce object life cycles of different levels of detail.
• Checking the consistency of process models against given object life cycles identifies activities in process models that induce non-conformant state changes for business items and determines whether some parts of object life cycles are not covered by any process model. Inconsistency resolution support partially automates the process of resolving detected inconsistencies.
• Generation of a process model from object life cycles synthesizes a process model that manipulates the given business items in accordance with their intended life cycles.
• Import and export capabilities facilitate the exchange of object life cycle models between projects and allow users to save object life cycle information in a table format or as an image for use in reports. It is also possible to open an object life cycle model as a Business State Machine in WebSphere Integration Developer in order to build deployable components.

The download package includes Eclipse plug-in binaries, installation instructions, and tutorials with example models.

How does it work?

The tool is a set of Eclipse plug-ins for WebSphere Business Modeler. Object life cycle models are based on the same metamodel as Business State Machines in WebSphere Integration Developer and are saved as .sacl files.

For the extraction of object life cycles from process models and the consistency check, automatic completion of the business item state specification is first performed in the given process models. States are propagated along object flows in the process models until a set of business item states is determined for every object input and output.

The object life cycle extraction is then performed by applying transformation rules, which map activities in process models to state transitions in object life cycles and identify initial and final states for each life cycle.

The consistency check evaluates several consistency conditions on the given process models and object life cycles. The purpose of this consistency check is to detect non-conformant state changes of business items induced in the process models and parts of the given life cycles that are not covered by the process models.

For the generation of a process model from a set of object life cycles, a composition of the life cycles is computed first and then transformation rules are applied in order to map the composite life cycle to a process model.