An activity in
Unified Modeling Language
The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a general-purpose, developmental modeling language in the field of software engineering that is intended to provide a standard way to visualize the design of a system.
The creation of UML was originally m ...
(UML) is a major task that must take place in order to fulfill an operation contract. Th
Student Guide to Object-Oriented Developmentdefines an activity as a sequence of activities that make up a process. Activities can be represented in
activity diagram
Activity diagrams are graphical representations of workflows of stepwise activities and actions with support for choice, iteration and concurrency. In the Unified Modeling Language, activity diagrams are intended to model both computational and o ...
s
An activity can represent:
* The invocation of an operation.
* A step in a
business process
A business process, business method or business function is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks by people or equipment in which a specific sequence produces a service or product (serves a particular business goal) for a parti ...
.
* An entire business process.
Activities can be decomposed into subactivities, until at the bottom we find
atomic actions.
The underlying conception of an activity has changed between UML 1.5 and UML 2.0. In UML 2.0 an activity is no longer based on the state-chart rather it is based on a
Petri net
A Petri net, also known as a place/transition (PT) net, is one of several mathematical modeling languages for the description of distributed systems. It is a class of discrete event dynamic system. A Petri net is a directed bipartite graph that ...
like coordination mechanism. There the activity represents user-defined behavior coordinating actions. Actions in turn are pre-defined (UML offers a series of actions for this).
{{DEFAULTSORT:Activity (Uml)
Unified Modeling Language