Formal verification of UML state diagrams

Abstract

In spite of its informal semantics and of some ambiguities, UML is a widespread modelling language used in both industry and academia. On the other hand, Petri nets are a mathematical modelling language with a formal semantics and are well suited for formal verification. However, altough there is a growing interest in model checking techniques from industry, the software engineers continue to be unfamiliar with such a formalism. For that reason, it is convenient to supply formal verification techniques of UML diagrams that are completely automatic and transparent to the designer. This is the issue discussed in this paper. We propose to translate UML state diagrams into Coloured Petri nets on which verification of some desired properties can be checked automatically. We show on our example that, when expected properties are not checked, this is an opportunity to revise the model into a more adequate one

Verification and Validation of UML Artifact-Centric Business Process Models

“…For instance, [15] focuses on the class diagram, [5] handles state-machine diagrams, and [7] focuses on activity diagrams. As far as approaches examining various UML diagrams, [13] offers a systematic literature review but only four of the analyzed papers perform reasoning on more than one of the diagrams in our approach: they can handle class and state machine diagrams.…”

A Logic-Based Approach for the Verification of UML Timed Models

“…It would be interesting to understand how this could be done by exploiting the semantics for Sequence Diagrams proposed by the same author [Hammal 2006], but unfortunately no further details are provided. Choppy et al [Choppy et al 2011] propose a translation of UML state diagrams into Colored Petri nets, and the verification of desired properties can be carried out automatically. The OMEGA framework by Ober and Dragomir [Ober and Dragomir 2010] addresses Class Diagrams, Component Diagrams, and State Machine Diagrams in terms of communicating extended timed automata, then translated into the IF language-supported by a number of verification tools.…”

Reasoning on UML Data-Centric Business Process Models

“…On the subject of reasoning on UML diagrams, research has either focused on one particular type of diagram or on the consistency between some of them. Examples of approaches that fall in the first category are [10,11] for the class diagram, [4] for the state-machine diagram or [6] for the activity diagram.…”