Formalizing Semantics for UML Activity Diagram through Regular Expression Translation

Formalization of UML models now becomes a requisite action by most of the software designers. UML is semiformal in nature. So it becomes necessary to formalize the UML which would reduce the overall complexity of software design. Today as software becoming more interactive and distributed in nature, the formal syntax and automated verification analysis of behavioral aspect of any model becomes very important in order to reduce overall software development cost and time. UML Activity diagram has become widely acceptable tool for documenting the artifacts related to Control flow and complexity of the software system. Here Authors proposed the semantics for activity diagram of UML by means of regular expression and its equivalent transition system. UML has now become one of the most widely acceptable standards for visual modeling related to object based software development. Since inception, continuous adoption of various design patterns and profiles of software have been included to make it more flexible and capable to represent different views of software design at early phases of its development. It is also found that the mapping of these visual modeling structures to some pre-established formal graphical notations of data structures like graph certainly provides more realistic and robust automated verification and validation ground for these models. The available literature shows the tremendous research work is being carried out to make it more adoptable and reliable visual modeling platform across the globe. Although UML has a richer and wider visual modeling skill set, but still it is not very easy to find better ground for establishing, set of rules and semantics for UML model verification and validation. The research work also proposes a formal verification and traceability method for any activity model with the help of Arden's lemma. The correctness of proposed verification method has been shown with supporting case studies after generating its corresponding formal regular expression.