UML state machines are quite popular and useful to specify dynamic components of software systems. They have a formal static semantics but their execution semantics is described only informally. Graph transformation, on the other hand, constitutes a well-studied area with many theoretical results and practical application domains. In this paper, an operational semantics for a subset of UML state machines is proposed which is based on graph transformation. In more detail, a UML state machine is described as a structured graph transformation system in such a way that the wellformedness rules of UML state machines are satisfied and the firing of a (maximum) set of enabled non-conflicting transitions corresponds to the application of a graph transformation rule. The presented approach uses the concept of transformation units, a recently developed modularization concept for graph transformation systems.
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