Temporal constraint support for OCL

Abstract

The Object Constraint Language is widely used to express precise and unambiguous constraints on models and object oriented programs. However, the notion of temporal constraints, controlling the system behavior over time, has not been natively supported. Such temporal constraints are necessary to model reactive and real-time systems. Although there are works addressing temporal extensions of OCL, they only bring syntactic extensions without any concrete implementation conforming to the OCL standard. On top of that, all of them are based on temporal logics that require particular skills to be used in practice. In this paper, we propose to fill in both gaps. We first enrich OCL by a pattern-based temporal layer which is then integrated into the current Eclipse's OCL plug-in. Moreover, the temporal constraint support for OCL, that we define using formal scenario-based semantics, connects to automatic test generators and forms the first step towards creating a bridge linking model driven engineering and usual formal methods. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.