Action

The key action is a trade.

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The drawing shows a typical trade. The notation is one of several possible notations for a joint action.

On Thursday the eighth of February 2001, the Bureau of the Public Debt holds an auction which includes ten thousand million dollars face value of a thirty year bond with an interest rate of five and three-eights percent. Modesto is a successful bidder in this auction, and is awarded 720 million dollars of this issue. The price of the bonds is 98.753, giving an effective yield to maturity of 5.460%. The maturity date of the bonds is Saturday the fifteenth of February 2031.

These details are not shown in the drawing. They might be shown by a tool in a property sheet.

tradeSheet.gif (3110 bytes)

There are certainly other ways to make a model of this trade. How something is modeled is always the choice of the modeler (within the rules of the language).
But let’s do this:

trade20984-3-roles.gif (2170 bytes)

The action is named, using the identifier.

Of course, trade data will be stored in the system not in the model. But it will often be useful to give concrete examples in a model.

And it may sometimes be desirable to model specific actions in a model, not as examples, but in order to fully specify the system. For example, a system may have a unique first action that begins the initialization of that system.

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