Automatic Generation of Compatible Interfaces from Partitioned UML Activities

Behavioral interfaces describing the sequences of buffered signal transmissions between components are useful to ensure that components can interact consistently. Previous work has shown that compatible interfaces at each side of a channel are in general asymmetric: In cases where both communicating sides can take initiative and send, they have to be prepared for conflicts that need resolution. Such conflicts are often difficult to handle properly at the interaction level, where the intent of the actual application may be obscured by technical details. For this reason, we developed an automated method that starts with a holistic and collaborative view on distributed behavior provided by UML activities, in which components are represented by separate partitions. Once the activity is well-formed, pairs of interfaces for each channel are derived by cutting the activity along its partitions and exploring the visible behavior between them. The resulting interfaces are compatible by construction and allow other entities to interact consistently across them. The proposed method is implemented as part of our tool support.