Towards Extending UML's Activity Diagram for the Architectural Modeling, Analysis, and Implementation

Abstract

SAWUML is a general-purpose software modeling language that extends UML by unifying component and sequence diagrams for the specifications of software architectures. While component diagram is used for modeling the system structures, sequence diagram is extended with the Design-by-Contract approach for the modeling of system behaviors. In this paper, we aim at enhancing the language usability by providing alternative modeling choices for practitioners. To this end, we extended SAWUML's notation set with UML's activity diagram for the behavior modeling. So, practitioners may now use either sequence or activity diagrams, while the system structures are still modeled with component diagrams. We also extended SAWUML's modeling editor for creating software architecture models together with component and activity diagrams and the code generators for automatically obtaining (i) formal models in SPIN's ProMeLa for formal verification and (ii) Java-based implementation. We illustrate our language extension with the gas station case-study. I.INTRODUCTIONOFTWARE architecture is the structure of a system that comprises components, their behavioral specifications, and interactions with each other [1]-[3]. The software architecture is concerned with which components a system consists of and whether these components are integrated and working together, as well as what kind of interfaces the components will have, what will be the inter-component communication and dependencies. For modelling software architectures an Architecture Description Language (ADL) plays an important role [4]-[6].An ADL is a formal specification language for describing the structures and behaviors of components and connectors at an abstraction level for the software architecture of a system. ADLs are designed for different domains (e.g., embedded, automotive, multi-agent, and distributed) and purposes such as modeling software structures, modeling software architectures from different viewpoints (e.g., structure, behavior, concurrency), non-functional property