From UML state machines to Petri nets: History attribute translation strategies

This paper presents a set of translation strategies from state machines using the history attribute to a class of non-autonomous Petri nets named Input-Output Place Transition Nets (IOPT nets). IOPT nets extend the well-known low-level Petri net class of place transition nets with input and output signals and events. Other state machine elements translation mechanisms were already proposed and are here revised and improved to support the last available version of UML (UML 2.4 - Beta 2, March 2011). There are various goals that we intend to achieve with the translation from state machines to IOPT nets: benefit from the integration on a Petri net-based framework for the development of embedded systems using co-design techniques allowing generation of code for different platforms and languages; contribution for the development of tools to create, edit, verify proprieties, optimize, support model transformation, execute and visualize UML state machines.