Refinement Inference for Sequence Diagrams

Abstract. Refinement is fundamental to software development. An earlier work proposed a refinement relation between sequence diagrams basedontheirrequiredbehaviors. Inthispaper,we firstgeneralize therefinement relation by taking into account system variable assignment and event hiding, renaming and substitution. We then give an algorithm as a system of inference rules that does not just verify refinement relationship between twosequence diagrams butalso derives sufficient conditions under which such a relationship holds. The algorithm makes use of a semantics preserving transformation on sequence diagrams. The usefulness of refinement inference is demonstrated with a case study