Towards Automated fUML Model Verification with Petri Nets

One of the goals of the Foundational UML Subset (fUML) is a consistent and well-defined execution of UML activity diagrams. However, the specification is not done in a formal mathematical model and leaves room for implementation-specific tool details. This paper shows how this may lead to problems for concurrent program semantics. To this end, the paper introduces a transformation and basic analysis methods for activity diagrams under the current fUML sequential execution semantics. The analysis is conducted using Petri nets, which are mathematical models with a graphical representation to describe distributed systems. There are numerous well-established analysis methods to validate specific desirable properties of a concurrent program including liveliness, the absence of deadlocks, fairness, mutual exclusion, and detection of unreachable states. In this paper, we show that the intuitive translation to Petri nets does not fit the current fUML execution implementation; therefore, we introduce a new model-to-model transformation realized with QVTo, that translates a set of the most used fUML elements to Petri nets. Moreover, we propose methods to analyze the models with the tool TimeNET.