Activity Diagrams Patterns for Modeling Business Processes∗†

Abstract Designing and analyzing business processes is the starting point of the de-velopment of enterprise applications, especially when following the SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) paradigm. UML activity diagrams are often used to model business processes. Unfortunately, their rich syntax favors mistakes by designers; furthermore, their informal semantics prevents the use of automated verification techniques. In this paper, (i) we propose activity diagram patterns for modeling busi-ness processes, (ii) we devise a modular mechanism to compose diagram fragments into a UML activity diagram, and (iii) we propose a semantics for the produced ac-tivity diagrams, formalized by colored Petri nets. Our approach guides the modeler task (helping to avoid common mistakes), and allows for automated verification