Abstract not found

In object-oriented software development, requirements of different stakeholders are often manifested in use case models which complement the static domain model by dynamic and functional requirements. In the course of development, these requirements are analyzed and integrated to produce a consistent overall requirements specification. Iterations of the model may be triggered by conflicts between requirements of different parties. However, due to the...

this paper we present a specification technique based on graph transformations which supports such a development approach. The use of graphs and graph transformations supports an intuitive understanding and an integration of static and dynamic aspects on a well-defined semantical base. On this background, formal notions of view and view relation are developed and the behaviour of views is described by a loose semantics. The integration of two views derived from a common reference model is done in two steps. First, dependencies between the views which are not given by the reference model are determined, and the reference model is extended appropriately. This is the task of a model manager. If the two views and the reference model are consistent, the actual view integration can be performed automatically. For the case of more than two views more general scenarios are developed and discussed. All concepts and results are illustrated at the well-known example of a banking system.

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We present an event structure semantics for contextual nets, an extension of P/T Petri nets where transitions can check for the presence of tokens without consuming them (read-only operations). A basic rôle is played by asymmetric event structures, a generalization of Winskel’s prime event structures where symmetric conflict is replaced by a relation modelling asymmetric conflict or weak causality, used to represent a new kind of dependency between events arising in contextual nets. Extending Winskel’s seminal work on safe nets, the truly concurrent event based semantics of contextual nets is given at categorical level via a chain of coreflections

The paper presents a case study on the synthesis of labelled transition systems (ltss) for process calculi, choosing as testbed Milner’s Calculus of Communicating System (ccs). The proposal is based on a graphical encoding: each ccs process is mapped into a graph equipped with suitable interfaces, such that the denotation is fully abstract with respect to the usual structural congruence. Graphs with interfaces are amenable to the synthesis mechanism based on borrowed contexts (bcs), proposed by Ehrig and König (which are an instance of relative pushouts, originally introduced by Milner and Leifer). The bc mechanism allows the effective construction of an lts that has graphs with interfaces as both states and labels, and such that the associated bisimilarity is automatically a congruence. Our paper focuses on the analysis of the lts distilled by exploiting the encoding of ccs processes: besides offering some technical contributions towards the simplification of the bc mechanism, the key result of our work is the proof that the bisimilarity on processes obtained via bcs coincides with the standard strong bisimilarity for ccs.

A taxonomy of model transformations was introduced in [16]. Among others, such a taxonomy can help developers in deciding which language, forma lism, tool or mechanism is best suited to carry out a particular model transformation activity. In this paper we apply the taxonomy to the technique of graph transformation, and we exemplify it by referring to four representative graph transformation tools. As a byproduct of our analysis, we discuss how well each of the considered tools carry out the activity of model transformation.

This paper presents a formal approach for managing unanticipated software evolution. Labelled typed nested graphs are used to represent arbitrarily complex software artifacts, and conditional graph rewriting is used for managing evolution of these artifacts. More specifically, we detect structural and behavioural inconsistencies when merging parallel evolutions of the same software artifact. The approach is domain-independent, in the sense that it can be customised to many different domains, such as software architectures, UML analysis and design models, and software code.

Abstract. Model checking is increasingly popular for hardware and, more recently, software verification. In this paper we describe two different approaches to extend the benefits of model checking to systems whose behavior is specified by graph transformation systems. One approach is to encode the graphs into the fixed state vectors and the transformation rules into guarded commands that modify these state vectors appropriately to enjoy all the benefits of the years of experience incorporated in existing model checking tools. The other approach is to simulate the graph production rules directly and build the state space directly from the resultant graphs and derivations. This avoids the preprocessing phase, and makes additional abstraction techniques available to handle symmetries and dynamic allocation. In this paper we compare these approaches on the basis of three case studies elaborated in both of them, and we evaluate the results. Our conclusion is that the first approach outperforms the second if the dynamic and/or symmetric nature of the problem under analysis is limited, while the second shows its superiority for inherently dynamic and symmetric problems.

Requirements elicitation involves the construction of large sets of conceptual models. An important step in the analysis of these models is checking their consistency. Existing research largely focuses on checking consistency of individual models and of relationships between pairs of models. However, such strategy does not guarantee global consistency. In this paper, we propose a consistency checking approach that addresses this problem for homogeneous models. Given a set of models and a set of relationships between them, our approach works by first constructing a merged model and then verifying this model against the consistency constraints of interest. By keeping proper traceability information, consistency diagnostics obtained over the merge are projected back to the original models and their relationships. The paper also presents a set of reusable expressions for defining consistency constraints in conceptual modelling. We demonstrate the use of the developed expressions in the specification of consistency rules for class and ER diagrams, and i ∗ goal models. 1