Runtime Checking of UML Association-Related Constraints

Abstract

UML class models are important design artifacts used as blueprints of software systems to be built. Yet, implementations are often inconsistent with their models. Although many techniques have been proposed to tackle this problem, some dynamic aspects of a class model are still hard to be verified using existing techniques. In this paper, we present an approach to checking the UML association-related constraints during a program's execution. Our approach instruments event notification mechanism into Java bytecode and verifies the constraints imposed by design-level associations (including compositions), when certain events occur. The empirical studies show that our approach can help efficiently detect inconsistencies between a UML class model and its implementation.

Automatic Code Generation of Safety Mechanisms in Model-Driven Development

“…Once more, this approach designs its own domain-specific language instead of building on top of UML. There are also some approaches that aim to verify structural constraints during runtime, for example, class and component relationships [26][27][28]. Our approach, on the other hand, targets dynamic behavior during runtime.…”

Model-driven generation of runtime checks for system properties

“…In this paper, we focus particularly on the specification of constraints to be monitored at runtime, and tools that automatically generate runtime monitors from these specifications. In recent years, three classes of techniques have established themselves as the main focus areas for research: (1) contract-based approaches like JML [3], (2) approaches matching event traces against patterns, usually specified in a form of linear temporal logic (LTL) [8,11,12], regular expressions or context-free grammars [7,9,10,13], and extensions that include more complex data bindings and events [20][21][22][23], and (3) model-based approaches centered around UML-like models [16,17]. There is also a large body of work on other monitoring topics, such as intrusion and malware detection.…”

“…Techniques that use core UML are often concerned with monitoring structural constraints, such as class and component relationships [17,28,29]. OCL adds a finer-grained constraint language to UML and allows for deeper semantics, which can be exploited to generate at least simple checks based on program state combined with execution traces [14,16].…”

“…Structural descriptions such as UML class diagrams and architecture description languages (ADLs) constrain how parts of the system may be composed and how interactions happen. Monitors generated from such specifications observe component interactions and connections, and in some approaches even enforce constraints [14][15][16][17]. However, these techniques and languages are designed to clearly and concisely express the abstractions they use, but not to make expressing interesting properties easy.…”