Constituent elements of a correctness-preserving UML design approach

Abstract

The correctness of design decisions is a very relevant aspect of building any software or hardware system. Emerging techniques tend to include formal methods in the system design flow. Together with older, established techniques, already well known to the present day designer, the combined approach should bring benefits in the form of correctness of the design, increase of reliability, etc, all these leading to a similar increase in productivity. In this study, we present a method of such combined design, by mixing a formal method strategies and rules, with UML, a relatively new but popular design method. Our formal framework is represented by the Action Systems formalism. We show how the UML models can be correctly changed by incorporating precise derivation rules expressed in OCL. The initial, abstract models can be thus transformed into more concrete models, without violating the intended specification. © Springer-Verlag 2004.