Specification of UML Classes by Object Oriented Petri Nets

Class diagram, Object-Oriented Petri Nets, UML, transformation

The UML class diagram defines a basic architectonic model of the system. Its behavior is then usually described by other UML diagrams, such as activity diagrams, sequence diagrams, etc. These models serve for the design purposes and are automatically or manually transformed in the next development stages, typically to the models with formal basis or to implementation (production) environment. There is no backward step allowing to investigate the system structure and its behavior with the designed models. On the other hand, there are approaches to system design combining design, testing, and implementing stages into one development technique. One of them uses Object Oriented Petri Nets (OOPN) as basic modeling formalism. Nevertheless, OOPN lacks for advisable architectonic view of modeled systems as it is offered by UML class diagram. The paper is aimed at using UML class diagrams for system architecture description and the OOPN formalism for description of classes behavior. Since UML classes and OOPN classes partially differs, we define formal transformation between UML classes and OOPN classes.