Automated analysis of UML activity diagram using CPNs

Abstract

The UML behavioral models are used in understanding and communicating the problem domain concepts, during the requirement analysis phase of system development. The absence of formal semantics for UML behavioral models makes it difficult to build automated tools for their analysis, simulation and validation. These semantics should be well defined based on a formal language that yields the fundamental requirements for a rigorous validation of the specification models. In this paper, an approach is proposed for formal analysis and simulation of the UML behavioral models. Initially, we define UML activity diagram semantics. These semantics are translated into a Coloured Petri Nets (CPN). Hence, In order to allow a more concrete model behavior analysis, we coined the mapping rules from the specification models composed of objects and events. The results of analysis are in the form of a CPN-Tools report by means of state space analysis or model checking, to illustrate the proposed methodology we used a case study.