Mining hybrid UML models from event logs of SOA systems

In the paper we consider a method for mining so-called “hybrid” UML models, that refers to software process mining. Models are built from execution traces of information systems with service-oriented architecture (SOA), given in the form of event logs. While common reverse engineering techniques usually require the source code, which is often unavailable, our approach deals with event logs which are produced by a lot of information systems, and some heuristic parameters. Since an individual type of UML diagrams shows only one perspective of a system’s model, we propose to mine a combination of various types of UML diagrams (namely, sequence and activity), which are considered together with communication diagrams. This allows us to increase the expressive power of the individual diagram. Each type of diagram correlates with one of three levels of abstraction (workflow, interaction and operation), which are commonly used while considering web-service interaction. The proposed algorithm consists of four tasks. They include splitting an event log into several parts and building UML sequence, activity and communication diagrams. We also propose to encapsulate some insignificant or low-level implementation details (such as internal service operations) into activity diagrams and connect them with a more general sequence diagram by using interaction use semantics. To cope with a problem of immense size of synthesized UML sequence diagrams, we propose an abstraction technique based on regular expressions. The approach is evaluated by using a developed software tool as a Windows-application in C#. It produces UML models in the form of XML-files. The latter are compatible with well-known Sparx Enterprise Architect and can be further visualized and utilized by that tool.