Transforming object-oriented models to process-oriented models

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