A Formal Approach and its Tool Support for the Specification and the Verification of Structural Properties on UML Activity Diagrams.
Amel Mammar · 2006
This paper presents a formal approach and its tool support for the specification and the verification of UML activity diagrams against a set of structural properties. This work is part of a research project that aims at building correct business processes. In this project, a business process is described using an activity diagram. The verification of structural properties gives a certain degree of confidence regarding the correctness of the underlying transactions. Our proposal is based on the formal approach implemented in USE tool. This approach aims at validating a particular state of an object model against properties described in OCL language. The contributions of this paper are: the introduction of a meta-model based on class diagrams for UML activity diagrams, a set of rules for the translation of activity diagrams into USE specifications, and specification of structural properties in OCL. An automated tool supporting our approach is also presented.