Institutionalising UML 2.0 state machines

A key challenge to achieve a unified semantics for UML is how to handle the heterogeneity of its sublanguages. In this context, the theory of institutions provides an elegant and robust framework for programming in the large and in particular for compositionality. It can be used to define a family of formalisms which capture various UML sublanguages, and morphisms that represent the expected semantic relationships between them, resulting in a heterogeneous environment for the semantic definition of UML. The main goal of this work is to collaborate with the definition of such environment. For this purpose, we define an institution for UML 2.0 state machines. The building blocks of our institution are based on a previous semantics dealing with processing simple input events within a transition step. We also extend these semantic definitions for handling sequences of events, and then for considering runs through the state machine.