Extension to UML-B Notation and Toolset

The UML-B notation has been created as an attempt to combine the success and ease of use of UML, with the verification and rigorous development capabilities of formal methods. However, the notation currently only supports a basic diagram set. To address this we have, in this project, designed and implemented a set of extensions to the UML-B notation that provide a much fuller software engineering experience, critically making UML-B more appealing to industry partners. These extensions comprise five new diagram types, which are aimed at supplying a broader range of design capabilities, such as conceptual Use-Case design and future integration with the ProB animator tool

Generating a contract checker for an SLA language

SLAng is a language for expressing Service LevelAgreements (SLAs) under development as part of the Europeanproject TAPAS. It is defined using a meta-model, an instance ofthe Meta-Object Facility (MOF) model, in which the relationshipbetween the syntax of the language and its domain of applicationis explicitly represented, and the violation semantics ofthe language defined using Object Constraint Language (OCL)constraints. The concrete syntax of the language is the XMLMeta-data Interchange (XMI) mapping of the syntactic part ofthe meta-model. In this paper we describe how the Java MetadataInterface (JMI) mapping can be applied to the meta-modelof the language to generate interfaces and classes to create andquery SLAs and relevant service monitoring data in memory;and how an OCL interpreter can be applied to check violationconstraints over this data, resulting in the implementation of acontract checker that is highly likely to respect the semantics ofthe language

Engineering Object-Oriented Semantics Using Graph Transformations

In this paper we describe the application of the theory of graph transformations to the practise of language design. We have defined the semantics of a small but realistic object-oriented language (called TAAL) by mapping the language constructs to graphs and their operational semantics to graph transformation rules. In the process we establish a mapping between UML models and graphs. TAAL was developed for the purpose of this paper, as an extensive case study in engineering object-oriented language semantics using graph transformation. It incorporates the basic aspects of many commonly used object-oriented programming languages: apart from essential imperative programming constructs, it includes inheritance, object creation and method overriding. The language specification is based on a number of meta-models written in UML. Both the static and dynamic semantics are defined using graph rewriting rules. In the course of the case study, we have built an Eclipse plug-in that automatically transforms arbitrary TAAL programs into graphs, in a graph format readable by another tool. This second tool is called Groove, and it is able to execute graph transformations. By combining both tools we are able to visually simulate the execution of any TAAL program

Meta-Packages: Painless Domain Specific Languages

Domain Specific Languages are used to provide a tailored modelling notation for a specific application domain. There are currently two main approaches to DSLs: standard notations that are tailored by adding simple properties; new notations that are designed from scratch. There are problems with both of these approaches which can be addressed by providing access to a small meta-language based on packages and classes. A meta-modelling approach based on meta-packages allows a wide range of DSLs to be defined in a standard way. The DSLs can be processed using standard object-based extension at the meta-level and existing tooling can easily be defined to adapt to the new languages. This paper introduces the concept of meta-packages and provides a simple example