by Holger Giese, Florian Klein
Abstract:
The UML has become the de-facto standard in software engineering. Due to the visual nature and accessibility of its structural diagrams, it is widely accepted as the tool of choice for structural modeling. However, for specifying structural properties that go beyond cardinalities, the UML only provides a textual specification language, the OCL. For mixed structural and temporal properties, only proprietary combinations of OCL with temporal logic exist today. The intricate nature of both OCL and temporal logic already causes problems for many software engineers. When communicating with people without a computer science background, e.g. domain experts, employing OCL, any dialect of temporal logic, or a mix of both is usually impracticable. In this paper, we propose a visual language for specifying requirements including structural as well as temporal aspects. Based on UML Object Diagrams, our approach is capable of expressing both detailed static properties and requirements concerning structural dynamics in a clear and intuitive fashion. In addition, we present a scheme for turning a specification into a powerful behavioral monitor, enabling us to verify dynamic structural properties of models at run-time or in a model checker.
Reference:
Visual Specification of Structural and Temporal Properties (Holger Giese, Florian Klein), Technical report tr-ri-06-276, Computer Science Department, University of Paderborn, 2006.
Bibtex Entry:
@TechReport{GieseKlein2006_ag,
AUTHOR = {Giese, Holger and Klein, Florian},
TITLE = {{Visual Specification of Structural and Temporal Properties}},
YEAR = {2006},
NUMBER = {tr-ri-06-276},
INSTITUTION = {Computer Science Department, University of Paderborn},
URL = {http://www.upb.de/cs/ag-schaefer/Veroeffentlichungen/Quellen/Papers/2006/Giese-Klein-TR-RI-06-276.pdf},
PDF = {uploads/pdf/giese-klein-tr-ri-06-276.pdf},
ABSTRACT = {The UML has become the de-facto standard in software engineering. Due to the visual nature and accessibility of its structural diagrams, it is widely accepted as the tool of choice for structural modeling. However, for specifying structural properties that go beyond cardinalities, the UML only provides a textual specification language, the OCL. For mixed structural and temporal properties, only proprietary combinations of OCL with temporal logic exist today. The intricate nature of both OCL and temporal logic already causes problems for many software engineers. When communicating with people without a computer science background, e.g. domain experts, employing OCL, any dialect of temporal logic, or a mix of both is usually impracticable. In this paper, we propose a visual language for specifying requirements including structural as well as temporal aspects. Based on UML Object Diagrams, our approach is capable of expressing both detailed static properties and requirements concerning structural dynamics in a clear and intuitive fashion. In addition, we present a scheme for turning a specification into a powerful behavioral monitor, enabling us to verify dynamic structural properties of models at run-time or in a model checker.}
}