Activity Diagrams

Activity Diagrams
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Activity Diagrams
• Activity Diagrams consist of activities, states and transitions between activities
and states

• Activity Diagrams describe

– how activities are coordinated to provide a service
– the events needed to achieve some operation
– how the events in a single use case relate to one another
– how a collection of use cases coordinate to create a workflow for an
organisation

Activity Diagrams
 Slide 1: Activity Diagrams

• Activity Diagrams describe

– how activities are coordinated to provide a service – the service can be
at different levels of abstraction
– the events needed to achieve some operation, particularly where the
operation is intended to achieve a number of different things that require
coordination
– how the events in a single use case relate to one another – in particular,
use cases where activities may overlap and require coordination
– how a collection of use cases coordinate to create a workflow for an
organisation
• Activity Diagrams
– focus on the flow of activities involved in a single process
– show how activities depend on one another
– capture activities that are made up of smaller actions
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Activity Diagrams
• Model business workflows

• Identify candidate use cases, through the examination of business workflows

• Identify pre- and post-conditions for use cases

• Model workflows between/within use cases

• Model complex workflows in operations on objects

• Model in detail complex activities in a high level activity diagram

Activity Diagrams
Basics 3

Activity Diagrams
• Activities and Actions
• Transitions and Activity Edges
• Tokens and Activity Nodes
• Control Nodes
– Initial and Final Nodes
– Forks and Joins
– Decision and Merge Points
• States
• Swimlanes

Activity Diagrams
Example 4

Activity Diagram

Massimo Felici Activity Diagrams Ⓧc 2004-

2009
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Activities
• An Activity is the process being modelled

• Activities are the vertices of the diagram

• An Activity is a unit of work that needs to be carried out

• Any Activity takes time

• An activity is like a state where the criterion for leaving the state is the
completion of the activity

Activity Diagrams
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Actions
• An Action is a step in the overall activity

• The work can be documented as Actions in the activity

• There are four ways in which an action can be triggered

1. On Entry – as soon as the activity starts
2. Do – during lifetime of the activity
3. On Event – in response to an event
4. On Exit – just before the activity completes

Activity Diagrams
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Transitions
• A Transition is the movement from one activity to another, the change
from one state to another, or the movement between a state and an
activity in either direction

• Transitions: unlabelled arrows from one activity to the next

• Transitions take place when one activity is complete and the next can commence

Activity Diagrams
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Activity Edges
• The flow of an activity is shown using arrowed lines called edges or paths

• Control-flow Transitions indicate the order of action states

• Object-flow Transitions indicate that an action state inputs or outputs an

object

Activity Diagrams
 Slide 8: Activity Edges

• Time could be a factor in an activity

• Time events are drawn with an hourglass symbol

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Tokens
• Conceptually, UML models information moving along an edge as a token
(e.g., real data, an object or focus of control)

• Each edge may have

– a weight associated with it that indicates how many tokens must be
available before the tokens are presented to the target action
– a guard condition

Activity Diagrams
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Activity Nodes
• UML 2.0 defines several types of activity nodes to model different types of
information flow
– Parameters nodes
– Object nodes
– (input or output) Pins - special notation for object nodes; exception pins,
value pins

Activity Diagrams
Example 11

Flows and Edges

Activity Diagrams
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Initial and Final Nodes

• An initial node is the starting point for an activity

• Two types of final nodes: activity final and flow final

• An activity final node terminates the entire activity

• A flow final node terminates a path through an activity, but not the
entire activity

• It is possible to have multiple initial nodes and final nodes

Activity Diagrams
Example 13

Final Nodes

Warnings: be careful when using a flow final node after a fork. As soon as the
activity final node is reached, all other actions in the activity (including the ones
before the final flow node) terminate. If you want all forked actions to
finish, make sure to add a join.

Massimo Felici Activity Diagrams Ⓧc 2004-

2009
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Forks
• A transition can be split into multiple paths and multiple paths combined into
a single transitions by using a synchronisation bar

• A synchronisation may have many in-arcs from activities and a number of

out-arcs to activities

• A fork is where the paths split

• On an occurrence of the transition all the activities with arcs from the
transition are initiated

• A fork node splits the current flow through an activity into multiple concurrent
flows

Activity Diagrams
 Slide 14: Forks
In a detailed design model, you can use forks to represent multiple processes or
multiple threads in a program.
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Joins
• A join is where the paths meet

• The bar represents synchronisation of the completion of those activities with

arcs into the transition

• A join synchronises multiple flows of an activity back to a single flow of

execution

Activity Diagrams
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Decision and Merge Points

• A decision point shows where the exit transition from a state or activity may
branch in alternative directions depending on a condition

• A decision involves selecting one control-flow transition out of many control-

flow transitions based on a condition

• Each branched edge contains a guard condition

• Guard expressions (inside []) label the transitions coming out of a branch

• A merge point brings together alternate flows into a single output flow -
note that it does not synchronise multiple concurrent flows

Activity Diagrams
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States
• A state in an activity diagram is a point where some event needs to take place
before activity can continue

• Activities and States are similar

– States carry out actions as activities do
– Activities need to complete their actions before exiting
– States are used to imply waiting, not doing

• It is possible to show an object changing states as it flows through an activity

Activity Diagrams
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Start and End States

• The Start state is the entry point to a flow

• There can be several End states – multiple End states can be used to
indicated different follow-on processes from a particular process

• Start and End states can have actions too

• Malformed diagrams – it is possible to form ill-formed diagrams that require

multiple activations of activities or can allow deadlock

Activity Diagrams
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Swimlanes
• Swimlanes (or activity partitions) indicate where activities take place.

• Swimlanes can also be used to identify areas at the technology level where
activities are carried out

• Swimlanes allow the partition an activity diagram so that parts of it appear in

the swimlane relevant to that element in the partition

Activity Diagrams
 Slide 19: Swimlanes
Partitions may be constructed on the basis of:

• the class and actor doing the activity

• Partitioning by class and actor can help to identify new associations that have
not been documented in the class model

• the use case the activity belongs to

• Partitioning by use cases can help document how use cases interact
Slide 19: Smimlanes – Example
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Sending and Receiving Signals

• In activity diagrams, signals represent interactions with external participants

• Signals are messages that can be sent or received

• A receive signal has the effect of waking up an action in your activity diagram

• Send signals are signals sent to external participants

Activity Diagrams
 Slide 20: Sending and Receiving Signals

• Note that combining send and receive signals results in behaviour similar to
synchronous call, or a call that waits for a response.

• It is common to combine send and receive signals in activity diagrams,

because you often need a response to the signal you sent.
Example 21

Signals on Activity Diagrams

Activity Diagrams
Example 22

Sending and Receiving Signals

Activity Diagrams
 Slide 22: Advanced Activity Modelling

• Connectors
• UML 2.0 provides supports for modelling Exception Handling
• It is possible to show that an action, or set of actions, executes over a collection
of input data by placing the action in an Expansion Region (<<parallel>>,
<<iterative>> or <<stream>>)
• UML 2.0 defines a construct to mode looping in activity diagrams – A loop
node has three subregions: setup, body and test
• An action is said to be streaming if it can produce output while it is
processing input
• Interruptible activity region
• UML 2.0 introduces a new type of activity node, called the central buffer
node, that provides a place to specify queueing functionality for data passing
between object nodes
• A data store node is a special type of central buffer node that copies all data
that passes through it
Activity Diagrams for Use Case Modelling 23

How to construct Activity

Diagrams
1. Finding system Actors, Classes and use cases
2. Identifying key scenarios of system use cases
3. Combining the scenarios to produce comprehensive workflows described
using activity diagrams
4. Where significant object behaviour is triggered by a workflow, adding object
flows to the diagrams
5. Where workflows cross technology boundaries, using swimlanes to map the
activities
6. Refining complicated high level activities similarly, nested activity diagrams

Activity Diagrams
Activity Diagrams for Business Modelling 24

How to construct Activity

Diagrams
1. Finding business actors and use cases

2. Identifying key scenarios of business use cases

3. Combining the scenarios to produce comprehensive workflows described

using activity diagrams

4. Where appropriate, mapping activities to business areas and recording this

using swimlanes

5. Refining complicated high level activities similarly, nested activity diagrams

Activity Diagrams
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Readings

Required Readings

• UML course textbook, Chapter 11 on Activities

Activity Diagrams
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Summary
• Activity Diagrams are good for describing synchronization and concurrency
between activities

• Activity diagrams are useful for capturing detailed activities, but they can also
capture elements of the high level workflow the system is intended to support

• Partitioning can be helpful in investigating responsibilities for interactions and

associations between objects and actors

Activity Diagrams