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 since tangled operations should always be decomposed into simpler ones [1,2].
An activity [3] represents a behavior that is composed of individual elements called actions....
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Baresi, L. (2009). Activity Diagrams. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_9
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