Metamodel-based model conformance and multiview consistency checking

Model-driven development, using languages such as UML and BON, often makes use of multiple diagrams (e.g., class and sequence diagrams) when modeling systems. These diagrams, presenting different views of a system of interest, may be inconsistent. A metamodel provides a unifying framework in which to ensure and check consistency, while at the same time providing the means to distinguish between valid and invalid models, that is, conformance. Two formal specifications of the metamodel for an object-oriented modeling language are presented, and it is shown how to use these specifications for model conformance and multiview consistency checking. Comparisons are made in terms of completeness and the level of automation each provide for checking multiview consistency and model conformance. The lessons learned from applying formal techniques to the problems of metamodeling, model conformance, and multiview consistency checking are summarized

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

EmergencyGrid:Planning in Convergence Environments

Government agencies are often responsible for event handling, planning, coordination, and status reporting during emergency response in natural disaster events such as floods, tsunamis and earthquakes. Across such a range of emergency response scenarios, there is a common set of requirements that distributed intelligent computer systems generally address. To support the implementation of these requirements, some researchers are proposing the creation of grids, where final interface and processing nodes perform joint work supported by a network infrastructure. The aim of this project is to extend the concepts of emergency response grids, using a convergence scenario between web and other computational platforms. Our initial work focuses on the Interactive Digital TV platform, where we intend to transform individual TV devices into active final nodes, using a hierarchical planning structure. We describe the architecture of this approach and an initial prototype specification that is being developed to validate some concepts and illustrate the advantages of this convergence planning environment

An Analysis and New Methodology for Reverse Engineering of UML Behavioral

The emergence of Unified Modeling Language (UML) as a standard for modeling systems has encouraged the use of automated software tools that facilitate the development process from analysis through coding. Reverse Engineering has become a viable method to measure an existing system and reconstruct the necessary model from its original. The Reverse Engineering of behavioral models consists in extracting high-level models that help understand the behavior of existing software systems. In this paper we present an ongoing work on extracting UML diagrams from object-oriented programming languages. we propose an approach for the reverse engineering of UML behavior from the analysis of execution traces produced dynamically by an object-oriented application using formal and semi-formal techniques for modeling the dynamic behavior of a system. Our methods show that this approach can produce UML behavioral diagrams in reasonable time and suggest that these diagrams are helpful in understanding the behavior of the underlying application

Scenario-based verification and validation of dynamic UML specifications

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is the result of the unification process of earlier object oriented models and notations. Verification and validation (V&V) tasks, as applied to UML specifications, enable early detection of analysis and design flaws prior to implementation. In this work, we address four V&V analysis methods for UML dynamic specifications, namely: Timing analysis and automatic V&V of timing constraints, automated Architectural-level Risk assessment, Performance Modeling and Fault Injection analysis. For each we present: approaches, methods and/or automated techniques. We use two case studies: a Cardiac Pacemaker and a simplified Automatic Teller Machine (ATM) banking subsystem, for illustrating the developed techniques

Towards a scope management of non-functional requirements in requirements engineering

Getting business stakeholders’ goals formulated clearly and project scope defined realistically increases the chance of success for any application development process. As a consequence, stakeholders at early project stages acquire as much as possible knowledge about the requirements, their risk estimates and their prioritization. Current industrial practice suggests that in most software projects this scope assessment is performed on the user’s functional requirements (FRs), while the non-functional requirements (NFRs) remain, by and large, ignored. However, the increasing software complexity and competition in the software industry has highlighted the need to consider NFRs as an integral part of software modeling and development. This paper contributes towards harmonizing the need to build the functional behavior of a system with the need to model the associated NFRs while maintaining a scope management for NFRs. The paper presents a systematic and precisely defined model towards an early integration of NFRs within the requirements engineering (RE). Early experiences with the model indicate its ability to facilitate the process of acquiring the knowledge on the priority and risk of NFRs

Automatic code generation from UML diagrams: the state-of-the-art

The emergence of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) as the de-facto standard for modeling software systems has encouraged the development of automated software tools that facilitate automatic code generation. UML diagrams are used to diagrammatically model and specify the static structure as well as the dynamic behavior of object-oriented systems and the software tools then go ahead and automatically produce code from the given diagrams. In the last two decades substantial work has been done in this area of automatic code generation. This paper is aimed at identifying and classifying this work pertaining to automatic code generation from UML diagrams, restricting the search neither to a specific context nor to a particular programming language. A Systematic literature review (SLR) using the keywords “automatic code generation”, “MDE”, “code generation” and “UML” is used to identify 40 research papers published during the years 2000–2016 which are broadly classified into three groups: Approaches, Frameworks and Tools. For each paper, an analysis is made of the achievements and the gaps, the UML diagrams used the programming languages and the platform. This analysis helps to answer the main questions that the paper addresses including what techniques or implementation methods have been used for automatic code generation from UML Diagrams, what are the achievements and gaps in the field of automatic code generation from UML diagrams, which UML diagram is most used for automatic code generation from UML diagrams, which programming language source code is mostly automatically generated from the design models and which is the most used target platform? The answers provided in this paper will assist researchers, practitioners and developers to know the current state-of-the-art in automatic code generation from UML diagrams.Keywords: Automatic Code Generation (ACG); Unified Modeling Language (UML); Model Driven Engineering (MDE