Inter-Model Consistency in UML Based on CPN Formalism

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is one of the most widely used industry-standard modeling tools in object orientation. It provides us with variety of diagrams with rigorous syntax and semantics to build precise analysis models, design models, and implementation models for software development. Whereas this variety helps us to model the problem domain from various viewpoints, it makes it difficult to keep consistency between the models presented by different diagrams. This paper proposes a complementary modeling process to UML modeling, which makes it easy to keep consistency between heterogeneous UML models. The process is based on the use case driven approach and colored Petri net (CPN) formalism. The consistency is defined along the use case driven modeling process, using CPN formalism. The paper focuses on four major UML diagrams, among which the consistency is kept and assured. At the end of the process, we obtain four kinds of UML compatible CPN models, which can easily converted to the corresponding UML diagrams for further software development.