Model driven synthesis of behavioral models from textual use cases

Abstract

Software system's requirements are often specified by textual use cases due to their concrete and narrative style of expression. However, textual use cases have limitation in the synthesis of behavior since they have a poor basis for the formal interpretation. Existing synthesis techniques are either largely manual or focused on the use case interactions. In this paper, we present a framework from a model-based point of view to automatically synthesize system behavior from textual use cases to Petri net model. The generated Petri net model can describe component module interactions, and can be checked with the model checking tools. We have implemented our framework and demonstrated the synthesis process via an example. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.