Transformation of a core scenario model and activity diagrams into Petri nets

For any software development project it is important to capture the requirements in a clear and concise manner. Standardization efforts, such as the development of version 2 of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) by the Object Management Group, and the development of the User Requirements Notation (URN) by the International Telecommunication Union, propose visual languages for capturing requirements in terms of scenario notations. Activity Diagrams and Use Case Maps (UCM) are examples of such scenario languages in UML and in URN, respectively. The developers of these languages have concentrated on the visual notations and only a small amount of effort has been spent in defining precise and formal semantics for these languages. Core Scenario Model (CSM) is a step towards defining formal semantics to the scenario based languages like UCM, Activity Diagrams and Interaction Diagrams. It includes common scenario information found in the UCM notation and in UML 2.0 Activity Diagrams and Interaction Diagrams, and has been developed as an intermediate language before transformation into formal languages like Petri Nets, Layered Queuing Network etc. The thesis proposes a transformation method that takes UML Activity Diagrams as input and generates equivalent Petri Nets as output. The transformation approach takes into account the concurrency characteristics of Activity Diagrams. The thesis also proposes a method for transforming a Core Scenario Model (CSM) representation into equivalent Petri Nets. A Java tool was designed and built for realizing the proposed transformation from CSM to Petri Nets. The application takes as input XML files produced by an existing tool, which contain CSM in XML format. The Petri Nets produced by our transformation is in XML format. It can be used for validating the original models by simulation. The results from this analysis can be traced back to improve design decisions