Defining and verifying behaviour of domain specific language with fUML

Lai, Qinan; Carpenter, Andy

doi:10.1145/2325276.2325277

Cited by 8 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…Thus, we use a standardized and UML 2 complied action language which should act as a stimulus towards the establishment of a common action language for metamodeling. Recently, Lai and Carpenter [9] also proposed the usage of fUML for specifying the operational semantics of DSMLs. However, they focus on the static verification of fUML models to identify structural flaws such as unused or empty models.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

xMOF: Executable DSMLs Based on fUML

Mayerhofer

Langer

Wimmer

et al. 2013

Software Language Engineering

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When defining a domain-specific modeling language (DSML), the two key components that have to be specified are its syntax and semantics. For specifying a modeling languages' abstract syntax, metamodels are the standard means. MOF provides a standardized, well established, and widely accepted metamodeling language enabling the definition of metamodels and the generation of accompanying modeling facilities. However, no such standard means exist for specifying the behavioral semantics of a DSML. This hampers the efficient development of model execution facilities, such as debugging, simulation, and verification. To overcome this limitation, we propose to integrate fUML with MOF to enable the specification of the behavioral semantics for DSMLs in terms of fUML activities. We discuss alternatives how this integration can be achieved and show by-example how to specify the semantics of a DSML using fUML. To reuse existing runtime infrastructures, we further demonstrate the usage of external libraries in fUML-based specifications.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

xMOF: Executable DSMLs Based on fUML

Mayerhofer

Langer

Wimmer

et al. 2013

Software Language Engineering

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“…We tried to formalise it to a modelbased specification, which means creating a MOF based meta-model, formalising the well-formed rules to OCL and modelling the behavioural semantics of an operational language. The framework of defining the BPEL specification is based on our previous work [6]. The meta-model, the OCL constraints and the behaviours are all defined as ALF programs.…”

Section: Errors and Bad Practises In Dsl Specificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Experience has showed that basing tool development on model-driven technologies is simpler and faster than traditional language parser/compiler or interpreter approaches. Recently researchers have sought ways to extend the use model-driven technologies to definition of the behavioural semantics of a DSL [6,1,8]. .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Static Analysis and Testing of Executable DSL Specification

Lai

Carpenter

2013

Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development

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In model-driven software engineering, the syntax of a modelling language is defined as a meta-model, and its semantics is defined by some other formal languages. As the languages for defining syntax and semantics comes from different technology space, maintaining the correctness and consistency of a language specification is a challenging topic. Technologies on formal methods or sophisticated dynamic verification have been developed to verify a language specification. While these works are valuable, they can be hard to apply to a complex language in reality. In this paper, extended static checking and testing are used to maintain the correctness of a language specification, and the techniques are applied to a case study that formalises WS-BPEL to a model-based specification defined by OMG standard fUML and ALF. Several categories of different errors are identified which can happen during semantics development, and how our framework can simplify the checking on them by static checking and direct testing of executable models is discussed.

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“…As we will explain in Section 11.2, most of the related works [3,2,1,33,31,71,104,105,129,149,152] require translating the input model into a formalism where a dynamic and formal verification method (such as a solver, a model checker or a theorem prover) is available. Only few works [100,178,179] use static analysis to verify the models.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lightweight and static verification of UML executable models

Planas Hortal

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Executable models play a key role in many development methods (such as MDD and MDA) by facilitating the immediate simulation/implementation of the software system under development. This is possible because executable models include a fine-grained specification of the system behaviour using an action language. Executable models are not a new concept but are now experiencing a comeback. As a relevant example, the OMG has recently published the first version of the “Foundational Subset for Executable UML Models” (fUML) standard, an executable subset of the UML that can be used to define, in an operational style, the structural and behavioural semantics of systems. The OMG has also published a beta version of the “Action Language for fUML” (Alf) standard, a concrete syntax conforming to the fUML abstract syntax, that provides the constructs and textual notation to specify the fine-grained behaviour of systems. The OMG support to executable models is substantially raising the interest of software companies for this topic. Given the increasing importance of executable models and the impact of their correctness on the final quality of software systems derived from them, the existence of methods to verify the correctness of executable models is becoming crucial. Otherwise, the quality of the executable models (and in turn the quality of the final system generated from them) will be compromised. Despite the number of research works targetting the verification of software models, their computational cost and poor feedback makes them difficult to integrate in current software development processes. Therefore, there is the need for efficient and useful methods to check the correctness of executable models and tools integrated to the modelling tools used by designers. In this thesis we propose a verification framework to help the designers to improve the quality of their executable models. Our framework is composed of a set of lightweight static methods, i.e. methods that do not require to execute the model in order to check the desired property. These methods are able to check several properties over the behavioural part of an executable model (for instance, over the set of operations that compose a behavioural executable model) such as syntactic correctness (i.e. all the operations in the behavioural model conform to the syntax of the language in which it is described), non-redundancy (i.e. there is no another operation with exactly the same behaviour), executability (i.e. after the execution of an operation, the reached system state is -in case of strong executability- or may be -in case of weak executability- consistent with the structural model and its integrity constraints) and completeness (i.e. all possible changes on the system state can be performed through the execution of the operations defined in the executable model). For incorrect models, the methods that compose our verification framework return a meaningful feedback that helps repairing the detected inconsistencies.

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Defining and verifying behaviour of domain specific language with fUML

Cited by 8 publications

References 20 publications

xMOF: Executable DSMLs Based on fUML

xMOF: Executable DSMLs Based on fUML

Static Analysis and Testing of Executable DSL Specification

Lightweight and static verification of UML executable models

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