Synthesizing object life cycles from business process models

Unified modeling language (UML) activity diagrams can model the flow of stateful business objects among activities, implicitly specifying the life cycles of those objects. The actual object life cycles are typically expressed in UML state machines. The implicit life cycles in UML activity diagrams need to be discovered in order to derive the actual object life cycles or to check the consistency with an existing life cycle. This paper presents an automated approach for synthesizing a UML state machine modeling the life cycle of an object that occurs in different states in a UML activity diagram. The generated state machines can contain parallelism, loops, and cross-synchronization. The approach makes life cycles that have been modeled implicitly in activity diagrams explicit. The synthesis approach has been implemented using a graph transformation tool and has been applied in several case studies.