UML-Checker: An Approach for Verifying UML Behavioral Diagrams

UML is a visual modeling language used for specifying, visualizing, constructing, and documenting software artifacts. Despite having many features to model systems, conducting verifications and validations on UML models is not an easy task. In this paper, the problem of performing verification of UML models is discussed through a translation of UML behavioral diagrams into formal models to be verified by a symbolic model checker. An approach and tool (UML checker) is presented in order to conduct verifications on UML diagrams. The main ideas are: (a) provide an approach to perform the translation of activity, state and use case diagrams to the formal input language of the NuSMV checker; (b) automate the translation of UML diagrams to a formal language; and (c) provide a set of predefined validations that are used to check the diagrams.