Towards an Institutional Framework for Heterogeneous Formal Development in UML

Abstract

We present a framework for formal software development with UML. In contrast to previous approaches that equip UML with a formal semantics, we follow an institution based heterogeneous approach. This can express suitable formal semantics of the different UML diagram types directly, without the need to map everything to one specific formalism (let it be first-order logic or graph grammars). We show how different aspects of the formal development process can be coherently formalised, ranging from requirements over design and Hoarestyle conditions on code to the implementation itself. The framework can be used to verify consistency of different UML diagrams both horizontally (e.g., consistency among various requirements) as well as vertically (e.g., correctness of design or implementation w.r.t. the requirements).

UML/OCL or Object-Z?

“…As stated in [7], the exact nature of signatures, sentences and models is left unspecified, which leads to a great flexibility. This allows providing various SE-models (which do not at first sight look like logics) with an institutional semantics.…”

“…By "satisfaction of sentences by models changes consistently" it is meant that satisfaction is invariant under change of notation and enlargement of context (along signature morphism). For more details, the reader is kindly referred to [3,7].…”

“…According to [5,7,8], the OCL signature is defined by Σ = C ∪ T ∪ O where: -C is a set of class names, C= {Employee, Company} -T is a set of data types, T= {String, Set of Employee, Set of Company, void} -O the union of the set of query operations Q and the set of methods M: Q= {ssn, name, cid, activity, employee, employer}, M= {Hire}.…”

Towards a Software Engineering Approach to Multi-Scale Modeling and Simulation

“…Past and recent works [2,3,5,14,15] propose to bring together UML, widely used in industry and academia, and formal methods. Mainly three different approaches to integrate formal methods with UML are reported:…”

“…The second approach described in [14,15] recommends to keep the use of UML along the whole development life cycle; the main motivation here is the benefit of the visual modeling. This approach endowed UML with a sound semantics addressing by the way the consistency issue of the various UML models and the correctness issue of the refinement process of UML models.…”