A synchronization schema in activity diagrams via zero-safe-nets

Petri nets have been used as a formal semantic framework for UML activity diagrams. With UML 2.0 extensions, they become not able to express high level constructions in activity diagrams, namely the traverse-to-completion concept. This one requires a global synchronization between the fork and join nodes which is totally absent in ordinary Petri nets, based on local synchronization. To conserve activities behaviors, we propose zero-safe nets as a richer and more adapted semantic framework for activity diagrams by giving a generic mapping from activities to this Petri nets class. The proposed mapping preserves activities operational semantics while focusing on traverse-to-completion principle as well as synchronization between fork and join nodes and therefore, covering control/data flows and concurrency.