Transformation Rules for Synthesis of UML Activity Diagram from Scenario-Based Specification

Abstract

Although synthesis was considered an important and challenging approach to construction of a program or a program model in software development, most of research on synthesis has been devoted to the construction of state machine models or variations of them. Recently, as process modeling through languages like UML Activity Diagram and BPMN appears as a new paradigm of software development, the ability to synthesize models in such languages from requirements would tremendously increase the scope of automatic software development. This paper presents transformation rules for synthesis of UML Activity Diagrams from scenario-based specifications modeled as UML Sequence Diagrams. To that end, we first identify various control flow patterns of Sequence Diagrams and define rules for mapping them to corresponding parts of Activity Diagram. In order to make precise such mapping labeling rules are introduced for the patterns. Also we provide a synthesis algorithm for construction of a UML Activity Diagram from scenarios.