Incremental evaluation of OCL constraints

Abstract

Integrity checking is aimed at determining whether an operation execution violates a given integrity constraint. To perform this computation efficiently, several incremental methods have been developed. The main goal of these methods is to consider as few of the entities in an information base as possible, which is generally achieved by reasoning from the structural events that define the effect of the operations. In this paper, we propose a new method for dealing with the incremental evaluation of the OCL integrity constraints specified in UML conceptual schemas. Since our method works at a conceptual level, its results are useful in efficiently evaluating constraints regardless of the technology platform in which the conceptual schema is to be implemented. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.