Verifying action semantics specifications in UML behavioral models

Abstract

MDD and MDA approaches require capturing the behavior of UML models in sufficient detail so that the models can be automatically implemented/executed in the production environment. With this purpose, Action Semantics (AS) were added to the UML specification as the fundamental unit of behavior specification. Actions are the basis for defining the fine-grained behavior of operations, activity diagrams, interaction diagrams and state machines. Unfortunately, current proposals devoted to the verification of behavioral schemas tend to skip the analysis of the actions they may include. The main goal of this paper is to cover this gap by presenting several techniques aimed at verifying AS specifications. Our techniques are based on the static analysis of the dependencies between the different actions included in the behavioral schema. For incorrect specifications, our method returns a meaningful feedback that helps repairing the inconsistency.