UML consistency rules: a systematic mapping study

Context: The Unified Modeling Language (UML), with its 14 different diagram types, is the de-facto standard tool for objectoriented modeling and documentation. Since the various UML diagrams describe different aspects of one, and only one, software under development, they are not independent but strongly depend on each other in many ways. In other words, the UML diagrams describing a software must be consistent. Inconsistencies between these diagrams may be a source of the considerable increase of faults in software systems. It is therefore paramount that these inconsistencies be detected, ana

On the Complexities of Consistency Checking for Restricted UML Class Diagrams 1

Automatic debugging of UML class diagrams helps in the visual specification of software systems because users cannot detect errors in logical consistency easily. This paper focuses on tractable consistency checking of UML class diagrams. We accurately identify inconsistencies in these diagrams by translating them into first-order predicate logic generalized by counting quantifiers and classify their expressivities by eliminating some components. For class diagrams of different expressive powers, we introduce optimized algorithms that compute their respective consistencies in P, NP, PSPACE, or EXPTIME with respect to the size of a class diagram. In particular, for two cases in which class diagrams contain (i) disjointness constraints and overwriting/multiple inheritances and (ii) these components along with completeness constraints, the restriction of attribute value types decreases the complexities from EXPTIME to P and PSPACE. Additionally, we confirm the existence of a meaningful restriction of class diagrams that prevents any logical inconsistency