Research on Reverse Engineering from Formal Models to UML Models

Abstract

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) provides a graphical notation to express the design of object-oriented software systems and has become the de facto industry standard for software design. However UML lacks precise semantics and is semi-formal. Formal specification languages are intended to provide precise and complete models for proposed software systems. Many researchers have done a lot of work in translating UML models into formal models to validate UML models. But in this paper, we discuss the reverse engineering problem, that is, when the formal models are validated and corrected, how to reverse them to UML models. We think this problem is more meaningful for software engineer. This paper presents a method that translates formal models into UML models by XMI and its Schema, and then testifies the feasibility and correctness of the reverse method by Unifying Theories of Programming (UTP) [1].