Towards a Semantics of Activity Diagrams with Semantic Variation Points

TL;DR

This paper introduces a formal semantics for UML activity diagrams that incorporates semantic variation points, enabling customizable and application-specific interpretations of the diagrams.

Contribution

It proposes a novel semantics framework with variation points, allowing flexible interpretation and potential syntax variants for activity diagrams.

Findings

Semantic variation points enable customizable interpretations.

Concrete variants can reflect different application needs.

Framework supports both control and data flow modeling.

Abstract

UML activity diagrams have become an established notation to model control and data ow on various levels of abstraction, ranging from fine-grained descriptions of algorithms to high-level workflow models in business applications. A formal semantics has to capture the flexibility of the interpretation of activity diagrams in real systems, which makes it inappropriate to define a fixed formal semantics. In this paper, we define a semantics with semantic variation points that allow for a customizable, application-specific interpretation of activity diagrams. We examine concrete variants of the activity diagram semantics which may also entail variants of the syntax re ecting the intended use at hand.