Aligning OCL with UML

OCL is widely used by UML and other languages to constrain meta-models and perform evaluations on models. Unfortunately no OCL 2.x specification has ever been aligned with any UML 2.x specification. This lack of alignment makes some OCL compliance points such as XMI interchange unachievable. This paper describes how introduction of an OCL Pivot Meta-Model and clear exposition of the Values package may provide a solution to the alignment and a variety of other specification issues

Aligning OCL with Domain-Specific Languages to Support Instance-Level Model Queries

The Object Constraint Language (OCL) provides a set of powerful facilities for navigating and querying models in the MOF metamodelling architecture. Currently, OCL queries can be expressed only in the context of MOF metamodels and UML models. This adds an additional burden to the development and use of Domain Specific Languages, which can also benefit from an instance-level querying mechanism. In an effort to address this issue, we report on ongoing work on defining a rigorous approach for aligning the OCL querying and navigation facilities with arbitrary Domain Specific Languages to support instance-level queries. We present a case-study that demonstrates the usefulness and practicality of this approach

Identifying Potential Problems and Risks in GQM+Strategies Models Using Metamodel and Design Principles

Although GQM+Strategies®1 assures that business goals and strategies are aligned throughout an organization and at each organizational unit based on the rationales to achieve the overall business goals, whether the GQM+Strategies grid is created correctly cannot be determined because the current definition of GQM+Strategies allows multiple perspectives when aligning goals with strategies. Here we define modeling rules for GQM+Strategies with a metamodel specified with a UML class diagram. Additionally, we create design principles that consist of relationship constraints between GQM+Strategies elements, which configure GQM+Strategies grids. We demonstrate that the GQM+Strategies grids can be automatically determined with the help of design principles described in OCL. In fact, an experiment is implemented using these approaches in order to show that this method helps identify and improve potential problems and risks. The results confirm that our approaches help create a consistent GQM+Strategies grid

Consistency in Multi-Viewpoint Architectural Design of Enterprise Information Systems

Different stakeholders in the design of an enterprise information system have their own view on that design. To help produce a coherent design this paper presents a framework that aids in specifying relations between such views. To help produce a consistent design the framework also aids in specifying consistency rules that apply to the view relations and in checking the consistency according to those rules. The framework focuses on the higher levels of abstraction in a design, we refer to design at those levels of abstraction as architectural design. The highest level of abstraction that we consider is that of business process design and the lowest level is that of software component design. The contribution of our framework is that it provides a collection of basic concepts that is common to viewpoints in the area of enterprise information systems. These basic concepts aid in relating viewpoints by providing: (i) a common terminology that helps stakeholders to understand each others concepts; and (ii) a basis for defining re-usable consistency rules. In particular we define re-usable rules to check consistency between behavioural views that overlap or are a refinement of each other. We also present an architecture for a tool suite that supports our framework. We show that our framework can be applied, by performing a case study in which we specify the relations and consistency rules between the RM-ODP enterprise, computational and information viewpoints

Conformance checking in UML artifact-centric business process models

Business artifacts have appeared as a new paradigm to capture the information required for the complete execution and reasoning of a business process. Likewise, conformance checking is gaining popularity as a crucial technique that enables evaluating whether recorded executions of a process match its corresponding model. In this paper, conformance checking techniques are incorporated into a general framework to specify business artifacts. By relying on the expressive power of an artifact-centric specification, BAUML, which combines UML state and activity diagrams (among others), the problem of conformance checking can be mapped into the Petri net formalism and its results be explained in terms of the original artifact-centric specification. In contrast to most existing approaches, ours incorporates data constraints into the Petri nets, thus achieving conformance results which are more precise. We have also implemented a plug-in, within the ProM framework, which is able to translate a BAUML into a Petri net to perform conformance checking. This shows the feasibility of our approach.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Recursion Aware Modeling and Discovery For Hierarchical Software Event Log Analysis (Extended)

This extended paper presents 1) a novel hierarchy and recursion extension to the process tree model; and 2) the first, recursion aware process model discovery technique that leverages hierarchical information in event logs, typically available for software systems. This technique allows us to analyze the operational processes of software systems under real-life conditions at multiple levels of granularity. The work can be positioned in-between reverse engineering and process mining. An implementation of the proposed approach is available as a ProM plugin. Experimental results based on real-life (software) event logs demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of the approach and show the huge potential to speed up discovery by exploiting the available hierarchy.Comment: Extended version (14 pages total) of the paper Recursion Aware Modeling and Discovery For Hierarchical Software Event Log Analysis. This Technical Report version includes the guarantee proofs for the proposed discovery algorithm

Modeling the OCL Standard Library

OCL is widely used by UML and other languages to constrain meta-models and perform evaluations on models. The OCL specification is the result of diligent but time-constrained human endeavor and so contains many inconsistencies, most of which are relatively easy to ignore as obvious typographical mistakes. However the need to ignore minor discrepancies undermines rigorous treatment of more significant issues. The minor issues can be substantially eliminated by auto-generating the specification. This paper provides early community visibility of proposed solutions to a variety of issues that arose while developing a model for the OCL Standard Library that forms the core of the OCL specification