Automated Mapping of UML Activity Diagrams to Formal Specifications for Supporting Containment Checking

Faiz UL Muram
Huy Tran
Uwe Zdun

Business analysts and domain experts are often sketching the behaviors of a software system using high-level models that are technology- and platform-independent. The developers will refine and enrich these high-level models with technical details. As a consequence, the refined models can deviate from the original models over time, especially when the two kinds of models evolve independently. In this context, we focus on behavior models; that is, we aim to ensure that the refined, low-level behavior models conform to the corresponding high-level behavior models. Based on existing formal verification techniques, we propose containment checking as a means to assess whether the system's behaviors described by the low-level models satisfy what has been specified in the high-level counterparts. One of the major obstacles is how to lessen the burden of creating formal specifications of the behavior models as well as consistency constraints, which is a tedious and error-prone task when done manually. Our approach presented in this paper aims at alleviating the aforementioned challenges by considering the behavior models as verification inputs and devising automated mappings of behavior models onto formal properties and descriptions that can be directly used by model checkers. We discuss various challenges in our approach and show the applicability of our approach in illustrative scenarios.

In Bara Buhnova, Lucia Happe and Jan Kofroň: Proceedings 11th International Workshop on Formal Engineering approaches to Software Components and Architectures (FESCA 2014), Grenoble, France, 12th April 2014, Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science 147, pp. 93–107.
Published: 2nd April 2014.

ArXived at: https://dx.doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.147.7 bibtex PDF
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