Towards model structuring based on flow diagram decomposition

The key challenge of model transformations in model-driven development is in transforming higher-level abstract models into more concrete ones that can be used to generate implementation level models, including executable business process representations and program code. Many of the modelling languages (like UML Activity Diagrams or BPMN) use unstructured flow graphs to describe the operation sequence of a business process. If a structured language is chosen as the executable representation, it is difficult to compile the unstructured flows into structured statements. Even if a target language structure contains goto-like statements it is often simpler and more efficient to deal with programs that have structured control flow to make the executable representation more understandable. In this paper, we take a first step towards an implementation of existing decomposition methods using graph transformations, and we evaluate their effectiveness with a view to readability and essential complexity measures