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

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

Abstract

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 19s 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.

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Authors
  • UL Muram, Faiz
  • Tran, Huy
  • Zdun, Uwe
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Shortfacts
Category
Paper in Conference Proceedings or in Workshop Proceedings
Event Title
11th International Workshop on Formal Engineering approaches to Software Components and Architectures (FESCA 2014). Satellite event of ETAPS, EPTCS 147. April 12th, 2014
Divisions
Software Architecture
Subjects
Software Engineering
Systemarchitektur Allgemeines
Event Location
Grenoble, France
Event Type
Workshop
Event Dates
April 12th, 2014
Series Name
EPTCS 147
Page Range
93-107
Date
April 2014
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