Towards a Semantics of Activity Diagrams with Semantic Variation Points
This work addresses the need for flexible semantics in UML modeling for software engineers and business analysts, but it is incremental as it builds on existing notation without introducing a new paradigm.
The paper tackles the problem of defining a formal semantics for UML activity diagrams, which are used for modeling control and data flow, by introducing a semantics with semantic variation points to allow customizable, application-specific interpretations, and it examines concrete variants that may affect syntax.
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.