Automated Mapping of UML Activity Diagrams to Formal Specifications for Supporting Containment Checking

Business analysts and domain experts are often sketching the behaviors of a software system using high-level models that are technology- and platform-independent. The developers will refine and enrich these high-level models with technical details. As a consequence, the refined models can deviate from the original models over time, especially when the two kinds of models evolve independently. In this context, we focus on behavior models; that is, we aim to ensure that the refined, low-level behavior models conform to the corresponding high-level behavior models. Based on existing formal verification techniques, we propose containment checking as a means to assess whether the system's behaviors described by the low-level models satisfy what has been specified in the high-level counterparts. One of the major obstacles is how to lessen the burden of creating formal specifications of the behavior models as well as consistency constraints, which is a tedious and error-prone task when done manually. Our approach presented in this paper aims at alleviating the aforementioned challenges by considering the behavior models as verification inputs and devising automated mappings of behavior models onto formal properties and descriptions that can be directly used by model checkers. We discuss various challenges in our approach and show the applicability of our approach in illustrative scenarios.Comment: In Proceedings FESCA 2014, arXiv:1404.043

Interacting Components

SystemCSP is a graphical modeling language based on both CSP and concepts of component-based software development. The component framework of SystemCSP enables specification of both interaction scenarios and relative execution ordering among components. Specification and implementation of interaction among participating components is formalized via the notion of interaction contract. The used approach enables incremental design of execution diagrams by adding restrictions in different interaction diagrams throughout the process of system design. In this way all different diagrams are related into a single formally verifiable system. The concept of reusable formally verifiable interaction contracts is illustrated by designing set of design patterns for typical fault tolerance interaction scenarios

Time exceptions in sequence diagrams

UML sequence diagrams partially describe a system. We show how the description may be augmented with exceptions triggered by the violation of timing constraints and compare our approach to those of the UML 2.1 simple time model, the UML Testing Profile and the UML profile for Schedulability, Performance and Time. We give a formal definition of time exceptions in sequence diagrams and show that the concepts are compositional. An ATM example is used to explain and motivate the concepts

cmUML - A UML based framework for formal specification of concurrent, reactive systems

Complex software systems possess concurrent and reactive behaviors requiring precise specifications prior to development. Lamport's transition axiom method is a formal specification method which combines axiomatic and operational approaches. On the other hand Unified Modeling Language (UML), a de facto industry standard visual language, lacks suitable constructs and semantics regarding concurrency aspects. Though UML includes action semantics, its higher level constructs and object semantics are inconsistent. Motivated by Lamport's approach, this paper proposes a UML based specification framework 'cmUML' ('cm' for concurrent modules) for formal specification of concurrent, reactive systems without object level diagrams and OCL. The framework integrates higher level diagrams of UML and addresses various concurrency issues including exception handling. It combines UML-RT and UML// SPT profile as the latter defines a core package for concurrency and causality. Further the framework includes the characteristic safety and liveness aspects of concurrent systems. The proposed framework is in contrast with existing approaches based on low level primitives (semaphore, monitors). The paper includes several specification examples validating the proposed framework

Recursion Aware Modeling and Discovery For Hierarchical Software Event Log Analysis (Extended)

This extended paper presents 1) a novel hierarchy and recursion extension to the process tree model; and 2) the first, recursion aware process model discovery technique that leverages hierarchical information in event logs, typically available for software systems. This technique allows us to analyze the operational processes of software systems under real-life conditions at multiple levels of granularity. The work can be positioned in-between reverse engineering and process mining. An implementation of the proposed approach is available as a ProM plugin. Experimental results based on real-life (software) event logs demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of the approach and show the huge potential to speed up discovery by exploiting the available hierarchy.Comment: Extended version (14 pages total) of the paper Recursion Aware Modeling and Discovery For Hierarchical Software Event Log Analysis. This Technical Report version includes the guarantee proofs for the proposed discovery algorithm

Translating standard process models to BPEL

Standardisation of languages in the field of business process management has long been an elusive goal. Recently though, consensus has built around one process implementation language, namely BPEL, and two fundamentally similar process modelling notations, namely UML Activity Diagram (UML AD) and BPMN. This paper presents a technique for generating BPEL code from process models expressed in a core subset of BPMN and UML AD. This model-to-code translation is a necessary ingredient to the emergence of model-driven business process development environments based on these standards. The proposed translation has been implemented as an open source tool

Activity diagrams: a formal framework to model business processes and code generation

Activity Diagram is an important component of the set of diagrams used in UML. The OMG document on UML 2.0 proposes a Petri net based semantics for Activity Diagrams. While Petri net based approach is useful and interesting, it does not exploit the underlying inherent reactive behaviour of activity diagrams. In the first part of the paper, we shall capture activity diagrams in synchronous language framework to arrive at executional models which will be useful in model based design of software. This also enables validated code generation using code generation mechanism of synchronous language environments such as Esterel and its programming environments. Further, the framework leads to scalable verification methods. The traditional semantics proposed in OMG standard need enrichment when the activities are prone to failure and need compensating actions. Such extensions are expected to have applications in modelling complex business processes. In the second part of the paper, we propose an enrichment of the UML Activity Diagrams that include compensable actions. We shall use some of the foundations on Compensable Transactions and Communicating Sequential Processes due to Tony Hoare. This enriched formalism allows UML Activity Diagrams to model business processes that can fail and require compensating actions

Towards an Intelligent Workflow Designer based on the Reuse of Workflow Patterns

In order to perform process-aware information systems we need sophisticated methods and concepts for designing and modeling processes. Recently, research on workflow patterns has emerged in order to increase the reuse of recurring workflow structures. However, current workflow modeling tools do not provide functionalities that enable users to define, query, and reuse workflow patterns properly. In this paper we gather a suite for both process modeling and normalization based on workflow patterns reuse. This suite must be used in the extension of some workflow design tool. The suite comprises components for the design of processes from both legacy systems and process modeling