Detecting deadlock in activity diagram using process automata

The activity diagram is a modeling tool that is widely used to capture the work flow. Despite its popularity, the activity does not have the precise drawing rules. Moreover, there are some incompatibilities between the semantics of the diagram's constructs. As a consequence, the diagram could contain the behavioral errors, such as deadlock. In this paper, we present a formalism using the automata-based technique to detect the deadlock in the activity diagram. First, the formal description of the activity diagram and process automata is proposed. Then, the transformation from the activity diagram to the process automata is provided. Based on the result automata, if there is at least one process sequence that is accepted, there is no deadlock in the diagram. The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated through the usage of several examples. The results of the experiments indicate that the proposed method can detect the deadlock in the diagram.