Abstract. Statechart Diagrams provide a graphical notation for describing dynamic aspects of system behaviour within the Unified Modelling Language (UML). In this paper we present a translation from a subset of UML Statechart Diagrams - covering essential aspects of both concurrent behaviour, like sequentialisation, parallelism, non-determinism and priority, and state refinement - into PROMELA, the specification language of the SPIN model checker. SPIN is one of the most advanced analysis and verification tools available nowadays. Our translation allows for the automatic verification of UML Statechart Diagrams. The translation is simple, proven correct, and promising in terms of state space representation efficiency.

Statechart Diagrams are a notation for describing behaviours in the framework of UML, the Unified Modeling Language of object-oriented systems. UML is a semi-formal language, with a precisely defined syntax and static semantics but with an only informally specified dynamic semantics. UML Statechart Diagrams differ from classical statecharts, as defined by Harel, for which formalizations and results are available in the literature. This paper sets the basis for the development of a formal semantics for UML Statechart Diagrams based on Kripke structures. Tliis forms the first step towards model checking of UML Statechart Diagrams. We follow the approach proposed by Mikk and others: we first map Statechart Diagrams to the intermediate format of extended hierarchical automata and then we define an operational semantics for these automata. We prove a number of properties of such semantics which reflect the design choices of UML Statechart Diagrams .• The work described in this paper has been performed in the context of the ESPRIT Project n. 27439-HIDE. tC.N.R., 1st. CNUCE,

The VIATRA (VIsual Automated model TRAnsformations)

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