Authors:
Martin Beckmann
;
Thomas Karbe
and
Andreas Vogelsang
Affiliation:
Technische Universität Berlin, Germany
Keyword(s):
UML2 Activity Diagrams, Information Extraction, Activity Semantics.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Languages, Tools and Architectures
;
Methodologies, Processes and Platforms
;
Model Transformation
;
Model Transformations and Generative Approaches
;
Model-Driven Software Development
;
Models
;
Paradigm Trends
;
Software Engineering
;
Syntax and Semantics of Modeling Languages
;
Systems Engineering
Abstract:
As the complexity of systems continues to increase, the use of model-driven development approaches becomes more widely applied. One of our industry partners (Daimler AG) uses UML activity diagrams as the first step in the development of vehicle functions, mainly for the purpose of communication and overview. However, the contained information is also valuable for further development tasks. In this paper, we present an automated approach to extract information from these high-level activities. We put a focus on aspects of activities such as propositional logic relations, sequences of actions, and differentiability of execution paths. The extracted parts are needed for the compilation of requirements and the creation of test cases. Also, this approach supports stakeholders unfamiliar with the notations of activities as implicit information is made explicit and hence more accessible. For this purpose, we provide a formalism for the kind of activities our industry partner uses. Based on
that formalism, we define properties that express the contained sequences and execution paths. Furthermore, the formalism is used to derive the underlying propositional logic relations. We show how the approach is applied to eliminate hundreds of existing quality issues in an existing requirements document.
(More)