Modelling Interactions for Automatic Execution Using UML Activity Diagrams

Software applications involving interactions of distributed systems are very common nowadays. Frequently, interactions are modelled during the analysis phase of a project and subsequently coded manually. Very often this results in a divergence of analysis model and the implemented code. Moreover, the border between interaction handling code and domain code may be blurred. In addition, hard-coding collaborations and interactions may impede maintainability of an application. In this paper, we propose a procedure for modelling interactions—and also collaborations—with the means of slightly extended UML activity diagrams. The resulting interaction model is then transformed to a machine interpretable format and may subsequently be processed and controlled by an interaction infrastructure, which we developed for this purpose. In addition, our procedure encourages a clear separation of interaction processing and domain code.