Static Flow Analysis of the Action Language for Foundational UML

One of the major advantages of Model-Driven Engineering is the possibility to early assess crucial system properties, in order to identify issues that are easier and cheaper to solve at design level than at code level. An example of such a property is the timing behaviour of a real-time application, where an early indication that the timing constraints might not be met can help avoiding costly re-designs late in the development process. In this paper we provide a model-driven round-trip transformation chain for (i) applying a flow analysis to executable models described in terms of the Action Language for Foundational UML (Alf), and (ii) back-propagating analysis results to Alf models for further investigation. Alf models are transformed into the input format for an analysis tool that identifies flow facts, i. e., information about loop bounds and infeasible paths in the model. Flow facts can be used, for instance, when estimating the worst-case execution time for the analysed model. We evaluated the approach through a set of benchmark models of various size and complexity.