Operational semantics of UML activity diagram: An application in project management

With its recent adoption by the International Organization for Standardization, we foresee that UML will be systematically used for object-oriented modeling in industry. UML activity diagrams have been typically used to model software and business processes. Due to its semi-formal semantics and high complexity, its advanced constructs such as expansion regions, interruptible regions, object nodes, time events, and compound activities are rarely used in practice. There has been significant work on formalizing UML activity diagrams in terms of its semantic domain: Petri net. However, none address the recent advanced constructs it offers. In this paper, we define the semantics of UML activity diagram using a rule-based model transformation. Verification and validation of the UML activity diagram model is then achieved by simulating and analyzing the Petri net model. We illustrate our technique by using an extension of UML activity diagram to facilitate project management tasks such as scheduling, cost estimation, and resource allocation.