Formalization of UML Models by RTPA

Real-time process algebra (RTPA) is a set of mathematical notations for rigorous system specification. The RTPA notation has a structure comprising of operands, primitive types, abstract data types, control logic, and relationships. It is capable to effectively capture a system design in terms of its architecture, static behaviors, and dynamic behaviors. However, the preferred approach to codify system definition is through visualization in the form of UML. Although UML has expressive graphical constructs that is easily understood, it is generally viewed as being informal. This paper proposes an automatic transformation between UML and RTPA. A transformation template is in the form of an UML profile to be used in the design of a system, which is an extension mechanism that allows specialization of the UML for a particular domain. The approach is based upon understanding RTPA and UML constructs and proceeds to identify, characterize, and rank semantic relationships in order to construct an optimal translation. The semantic relationship refers to the distance between RTPA and UML constructs and uses a linguistic distance measure that is reliable and sufficient for determining correspondence. Ultimately, the transformation template becomes a schema to transform UML system models into RTPA notation