Use cases that describe possible interactions involving a system and its environment are increasingly being accepted as effective means for functional requirements elicitation and analysis. In the current practice, informal definitions of use cases are used and the analysis process is manual. In this paper, we present an approach supported by a tool for use cases based requirements engineering. Our approach includes use cases formalization, a restricted form of natural language for use cases description, and the derivation of an executable specification as well as a simulation environment from use cases. q

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A Use Case is a specification of interactions involving a system and external actors of that system. The capability for use case modeling has been integrated to the Unified Modeling Language (UML) since its inception. However, use cases are only defined at an abstract level, as the UML Specification does not discuss use case description in text form. In this paper, we propose an abstract syntax for textual use case description as a meta-model extension of the UML Specification. This meta-model is based on elements commonly found in use case templates. The meta-model also includes OCL constraints for ensuring consistency with the UML specification.

A use case is a specification of interactions involving a system and external actors of that system. The intuitive, user centered nature of textual use cases is one of the reasons for the success of the use case approach. A certain level of formalization is however needed to automate use case based system development, including tasks such as design synthesis, verification and validation. In this paper, a mapping from textual use cases to a formal model (Petri nets) is proposed. Use cases are described in a restricted-form of natural language. The abstract syntax of the language is formally defined using a tuple structure. The mapping from use cases to Petri nets considers use cases sequencing constraints defined at the syntactic-level, and provides a definition of execution semantics to use cases.

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