Automatic Model Transformation from UML Sequence Diagrams to Coloured Petri Nets

• Autor(a) principal: João António Custódio Soares
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://hdl.handle.net/10216/106158
• topic: Engenharia electrotécnica, electrónica e informática; Electrical engineering, Electronic engineering, Information engineering

The dependence of our society on ever more complex software systems makes the task of testing and validating this software increasingly important and challenging. In many cases, multiple independent and heterogeneous systems form a system of systems responsible for providing services to users, and the current testing automation tools and techniques provide little support for the performance of this task. This dissertation is part of a larger scale project that aims to produce a Model-based Testing tool that will automate the process of testing distributed systems, from UML sequence diagrams. These diagrams graphically define the interaction between the different modules of a system and its actors in a sequential way, facilitating the understanding of the system's operation and allowing the definition of critical sections of distributed systems such as situations of concurrency and parallelism. This dissertation intends to develop one of the components of this project that will be in charge of the conversion of the descriptive diagrams of the system in Petri Nets. Petri Nets are a modeling formalism that is indicated for describing distributed systems by their ability to define communication and synchronization tasks, and by the possibility of executing them in runtime using tools such as CPN Tools. The objective will be to define Model-to-Model translation rules that will allow the conversion of models, in order to allow integration with the target system, taking advantage of existing model transformation frameworks (e.g. EMF - Eclipse Modeling Framework). With this, we have been able to hide the complexity of the system analysis to the user (Software Tester) introducing the possibility of automation, generation and execution of tests from the diagrams of test cases, and presenting the results (Errors and Code Coverage) visually. This document is divided in four sections. The first section introduces the context and motivation for the dissertation and defines the problem and goals. The second section consists in the summarization of concepts required to understand this dissertation, the state of the art of studies in this domain and an analysis of the tools to implement the solution. The third section explains the architecture and technological choices for the proposed solution. Finally, the last section explains the conclusions for this study and defines the future work plan.