The specification of business processes is becoming a more and more critical aspect for organizations. Such processes are specified as workflow models expressing the logical precedence among the different business activities (i.e. the units of work). Up to now, workflow models have been commonly managed through specific subsystems, called workflow management systems. We advocate for the integration of the workflow specification in the system domain model. This workflow-extended domain model is automatically derived from the initial workflow specification. Then, model-driven development methods may use the extended domain model to automatically generate an implementation of the system enforcing the business processes in any final technology platform, thus avoiding the need of basing the implementation on a dedicated workflow engine.

We adopt a formalized model-driven development process for workflow-based applications and provide a method for the automatic integration of the workflow model within the (platform-independent) domain model. The result (the workflow-extended domain model) is a full fledged domain model enriched with the types needed to record the required workflow information and with a set of process constraints over such types to control the correct workflow execution. We will represent it using UML class diagrams annotated will OCL constraints to represent the process constraints. The main characteristic of a workflow-extended domain model is that it automatically ensures a consistent behavior of all enterprise applications with respect to the business process specification. Our workflow-extended model is platform-independent and can benefit from any method or tool designed for managing a generic domain model, no matter the target technology platform or the purpose of the tool, spawning from direct application execution, to verification/validation analysis, to metrics measurement and to automatic code-generation in any final technology platform. Moreover, our workflow-extended models enable the definition of more expressive business constraints, including timing conditions or involving both workflow and domain information. These constraints are generally not allowed by workflow definition languages.

	Published paper at the conference MODELS 2007 (Nashville, TN, USA, October 2007)
	Full version of the paper, including the Appendix with a case study scenario

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