Time properties dedicated transformation from UML-MARTE activity to time transition system

Abstract

Critical Real-Time Systems (RTS) have strong requirements concerning system's reliability. UML and its profile MARTE are standardized modeling languages widely accepted by industrial designers to cope with the development of complex RTS. Relying on Model-Driven Engineering (MDE), time properties verification of UML-MARTE specifications at early phases of the system lifecycle becomes possible. A key issue is to eliminate the gap between UML semi-formal semantics and fully formal executable semantics using model transformation. The model transformation must guarantee the consistency between high-level user models and lowerlevel verification models. Meanwhile, it should guarantee that the subsequent verification is not too expensive and can be applied to real size industrial models. This paper presents an approach to translate UML-MARTE Activity Diagrams into Time Transition System (TTS) with the aim of efficiently verifying time properties in RTS. TTS is a generalization of Time Petri Nets (TPN) with the priority and data handling at the transition level, supported by TINA model checker. This contribution focuses on how to define the TTS formal semantics to avoid the core problem of state space explosion in model checking. This work has been integrated in a time properties verification framework for UML-MARTE RTS specifications. The proposed method is evaluated using a representative case study. Experimental results are given to demonstrate the method's performance.