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. Up to now, workflow models have been commonly managed through specific subsystems, called workflow management systems.

Instead, we advocate for a different approach that facilitates the generation of worklow-based applications. We propose to automatically integrate the workflow specification in the system domain model (i.e. in the system conceptual schema). Thanks to this integration, current Model-driven development methods can be used to automatically generate an implementation of the system enforcing all business processes in any final technology platform, thus avoiding the need of basing the implementation on a dedicated workflow engine.

This approach is explained here (have a look also at the extended version )