Towards the Support for Crosscutting Concerns in Activity Diagrams: a Graphical Approach

The current proposal for activity diagrams in UML 2.0 allows for very complex graphs, reflecting the numerous interdependencies among the several actions and resources. This paper proposes a graphical composition operation supporting the addition of crosscutting requirements in activity diagrams through node fusion, addition, and subtraction. The operation has a highly readable and intuitive graphical representation and allows simple traceability and coupling. It is illustrated by a set of examples related to the inclusion of mutual exclusion and fair execution across several activity nodes.

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