Formalizing UML class diagrams-a hierarchical predicate transition net approach

Unified Modeling Language (UML) has been widely accepted as the standard object-oriented development methodology in the software industry. However, many graphical notations in UML only have informal English definitions and thus are error-prone and cannot be formally analyzed. We present our preliminary results on an approach to formally define UML class diagrams using hierarchical predicate transition nets (HPrTNs). We show how to define the main concepts related to class diagrams using HPrTN elements