An Optimized Compilation of UML State Machines
Asma Charfi, Chokri Mraidha, Pierre Boulet · 2012
Due to the definition of fUML (Foundational Subset for Executable UML Models) along with its action language Alf (Action Language for fUML), UML (Unified Modeling Language) allows the production of executable models on which early verification and validation activities can be conducted. Despite this effort of standardization and the large use of UML in industry, developers still hand tune the code generated from models to correct, enhance or optimize it. This results in a gap between the model and the generated code. Manual code tuning except from being error prone can invalidate all the analysis and validations already done in the model. To avoid the code hand tuning drawbacks and, since UML is becoming an executable language, we propose a new Model Based Development (MBD) approach that skips the code generation step by compiling directly UML models. The biggest challenge for this approach - tackled in this paper is to propose a model compiler that is more efficient than a code compiler for UML models. Our model compiler performs optimizations that code compilers are unable to perform resulting in a more compact assembly code.