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An MDE Approach for Reasoning About UML State Machines Based on Constraint Logic Programming

Authors:
Beatriz Pérez

Keywords: UML state machines, OCL, Constraint Logic Programming, reasoning, MDE

Abstract:
Model Driven Engineering promotes models as primary artifacts in the software engineering development process. Such models must conform to a metamodel and held associated constraints which restrict their validity. The verification of models against such requirements becomes therefore a fundamental activity to ensure the quality of a system. In this context, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) constitutes one of the most commonly used modeling languages to represent both static and dynamic aspects of software systems. Nevertheless, while the formalization and analysis of static models has motivated a significant number of proposals, it far exceeds the research done on dynamic models, specially on UML state machines, considered to be the mainstay to represent the dynamics of a system. We have defined a proposal to reason about UML state machines based on Constraint Logic programming (CLP), using Formula as model finding and design space exploration tool. We show how to translate a UML state machine model into a CLP program following a Meta--Object Facility (MOF) like framework. Furthermore, we enhance our proposal by giving support for the automatic translation of state machines to Formula specifications, based on a Model Driven Engineering (MDE) approach. The proposed framework can be used to reason and validate UML state machine designs by generating valid sets of execution state configurations and checking correctness properties, using Formula as model exploration tool.

Pages: 34 to 39

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2014

Publication date: October 12, 2014

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4235

ISBN: 978-1-61208-367-4

Location: Nice, France

Dates: from October 12, 2014 to October 16, 2014