Synthesis of UML activity diagram from scenario-based specification

Abstract

Modeling driven approach and use case driven approach have inspired many researches about synthesis of models from use cases or scenarios. The purpose of model synthesis is to reduce the gap among requirement, design, and implementation by reaching to code generation from models. Business process modeling as a model driven approach has been proved its effects on analyzing and designing software. UML activity diagram, as a part of UML behavioral diagrams and one of industrial standards for business process modeling, is used for designing business process. Scenario-based specification provides textual or graphical notations for formalizing use case scenarios. In this paper, we provide a constructive approach for relating Message Sequence Chart (MSC) as scenario-based specification to business process model represented in UML activity diagram using our synthesis algorithm. We first identify how MSC expression can be transformed to UML activity diagram ones from the perspective of control flow pattern. We add the new labels to MSC specification and define the labeling rules for explicitly representing the ordering of events in each process of MSC, and provide a synthesis algorithm which constructs a UML activity diagram from multiple scenarios. Finally, we demonstrate our approach by applying the algorithm to the case studies.