Section: Contracts and Grants with Industry

BNP Paribas collaboration, Continuity between the process modeling and software design (2010-2011)

This direct collaborative action with the BNP Paribas company focused on the general study of business process modeling, and more specifically its continuity between the domain (business) and the technological (IT) spaces. Our work during this technological collaboration action was composed of two main parts:

1. A detailed study of the state of the art (in both industry and research worlds), also presenting initial proposals of concrete solutions;

2. An implementation of an extensible prototype, following the comments and recommendations of the previously mentioned study.

This work has been realized in several iterations allowing regular exchanges with BNP Paribas and useful feedback integration.

As a final result, the delivered items have been the following ones:

• The State-of-the-art document generally introducing MDE, and presenting existing works in business and IT modeling from both the research and industrial worlds. It also includes the overall specification of a prototype to be implemented as a potential solution for cartography;

• A complementary document presenting the principles and techniques for a model-based bridge between two tools. It also provides an architectural overview of such a bridge considering two real tools from both the business (BPMN) and IT (UML2) sides together with the concrete prototype implementation of such a bridge from BPMN to UML2 Activity Diagrams;

• A model-driven cartography framework called Portolan (http://code.google.com/a/eclipselabs.org/p/portolan/ ), based on the specification from the first document. It can be used as a general solution for building global views on business and technical spaces of a company.