From a BPMN Black Box to a Smalldb State Machine

• Main Authors: Josef Kufner, Radek Marik
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2019-01-01
• Series: IEEE Access
• Subjects: State machine; finite automata; state diagram; BPMN; business process model
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8698227/

The state of a state machine is a path between two actions; however, it is the rest of the world who walks the path. The development of a web application, especially of an information system, starts with use cases, i.e., model scenarios of how users interact with the application and its entities. The goal of this paper is to turn the use cases into a useful specification and automatically convert them into a model layer of a web application, in our case using finite automata. Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) provides a graphical syntax to capture the use cases, which is based on the theoretical background of Petri Nets. However, because BPMN does not capture the state of the modeled entities, it is impractical to use it as a specification of a persistent storage and model layers of the web application. To overcome this problem, we propose a new STS algorithm to infer a finite automaton that implements a chosen participant in a BPMN diagram that represents a given entity of the web application.