A rewriting logic-based semantics and analysis of UML activity diagrams: a graph transformation approach

Activity diagrams are UML behaviour diagrams which describe global dynamic behaviours of systems in a user-friendly manner. Nevertheless, UML notations lack firm semantics which make them unsuitable for formal analysis. Formal methods are suitable techniques for systems analysis. Rewriting logic and its language Maude provides a powerful formal method with flexible and expressive semantics for the specification and the analysis of systems behaviour. However, the learning cost of these methods is very high. The aim of this paper is to integrate UML with formal notation in order to make the UML semantics more precise which allow rigorous analysis of its models. In this paper, we propose a graph transformation-based approach to generate automatically Maude specifications from UML activity diagrams. The proposed approach is automated using the AToM3 tool and it is illustrated through an example.