A META-MODELING AND GRAPH GRAMMAR APPROACH FOR MODELING AND ANALYSIS OF E-ENTREPRENEURSHIP SYSTEMS

UML provides standard abstractions to simplify the documentation, understanding, and maintenance of object oriented complex software systems. UML sequence diagrams are used to describe the behaviors of systems. However, UML is a semi-formal language that lacks tools for analysis and validation of user requirements. In other hand, Petri Nets models are tools for the validation and performance analysis of distributed systems. In this paper we present an approach for transforming UML sequence diagrams to labeled generalized stochastic Petri nets. By this transformation we aim to bridge the gap between the semiformal notation (UML) and the formal notations (Petri nets) for analysis and validation purposes. UML is used for modeling and Petri nets are used for analysis. The approach is based on the combined use of Meta-Modeling and graph grammars. Since the input and the output models are graphs, we use Java based graph transformation to perform this process automatically. The approach is illustrated through an example from e-entrepreneurship domain.