Activity Diagrams

Synonyms

Control flow diagrams; Data flow diagrams; Flowcharts; Object flow diagrams

Definition

Activity diagrams, also known as control flow and object flow diagrams, are one of the UML (Unified Modeling Language [11]) behavioral diagrams. They provide a graphical notation to define the sequential, conditional, and parallel composition of lower-level behaviors. These diagrams are suitable for business process modeling and can easily be used to capture the logic of a single use case, the usage of a scenario, or the detailed logic of a business rule. They model the workflow behavior of an entity (system) in a way similar to state diagrams where the different activities are seen as the states of doing something. Although they could also model the internal logic of a complex operation, this is not their primary use, and tangled operations should always be decomposed into simpler ones [2, 1].

An activity [3] represents a behavior that is composed of individual elements called actions....