Formalizing UML State Machine Semantics for Automatic Verification–the PAT Approach

UML state machine is widely used in modeling the dynamic behavior of object-oriented designs in industry. But UML state machine specification, which is maintained by Object Management Group(OMG), is documented in natural language instead of formal language. The inherited ambiguity of natural language may introduce inconsistencies to the resulting state machine model. Formalizing UML state machine specification will solve the ambiguity problem and provide a uniformed view to software designers and developers. It also provides a foundation for automatic verification of UML state machine models, which can help to find software design vulnerabilities at an early stage and reduce the development cost. In this report, we are going to provide a thorough survey of existing work related to formalizing UML state machine semantics and automatic validation of UML state machine model dynamic behavior. We also discuss the shortcomings of existing approaches and propose our own solution for this problem.