Reasoning on UML conceptual schemas with operations

Abstract

A conceptual schema specifies the relevant information about the domain and how this information changes as a result of the execution of operations. The purpose of reasoning on a conceptual schema is to check whether the conceptual schema is correctly specified. This task is not fully formalizable, so it is desirable to provide the designer with tools that assist him or her in the validation process. To this end, we present a method to translate a conceptual schema with operations into logic, and then propose a set of validation tests that allow assessing the (un)correctness of the schema. These tests are formulated in such a way that a generic reasoning method can be used to check them. To show the feasibility of our approach, we use an implementation of an existing reasoning method. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.