Research And Realization Of Automatic Transformation From UML Activity Diagram To Colored Petri Net

With the promotion and development of software applications, their performance attractsmore and more attention. While it might be too late to discover the failure of softwareperformance because accurate performance parameters result from completed softwares.Therefore，evaluating software performance at the early stage of the whole development lifecycle is significant.The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is the most widely used standard language incurrent engineering modeling. Many researches have showed that using UML documents toobtain related model of software system from the early stage of software development, andthen analyzing and calculating these models can satisfy the need of the performanceevaluation. However, UML is not a formal language，which cannot be simulated and verifieddynamically. It has to combine UML with other formal methods to achieve performanceevaluation. Given advantages of Colored Petri Net (CPN) in modeling and simulatinglarge-scale systems, it is thought to be a highly efficient way that after modeling the softwaresystem by UML and converting UML models into CPN models, using CPN-tools, which is amature tool, to simulate and verify the performance of softwares. Actually, despite thetransformation of UML to CPN model has been researched a lot, the main idea of thesestudies is focus on graphics conversion, which needs a lot of manual intervention rather thanrealizing automatically, making this method not practical.Based on existing work, this paper implements the automatic transformation mechanismfrom UML2.0activity diagram to CPN model, which is part of automatic transformationfrom the whole UML model to CPN model. We propose a intermediate model that is called"executable model", based on module and hierarchy thought. Refering to structured high-levelprogramming language, this model has good readability and is easily understandable. UMLdiagram elements (not just elements of activity diagram) can be converted into different typesof nodes conveniently. Depending on strict one-to-one relationship between CPN model andnodes of executable model, activity diagrams are transformed into CPN models with littlemanual intervention. Therefore, it turns the method of combining UML with CPN into a qualified software performance evaluation tool instead of just a theory, which has greatimportance in real-time monitoring performance of large-scale software and modifyingdevelopment process in time during the development life cycle.