Towards an institutional framework for heterogeneous formal development in UML —A position paper—

Abstract

We present a framework for formal software development with UML. In contrast to previous approaches to equipping UML with a formal semantics, we propose an institution-based heterogeneous approach. This can express suitable formal semantics of the different UML diagram types directly, without the need to map everything to one specific formalism (let it be first-order logic or graph grammars). We provide ideas how different aspects of the formal development process can be coherently formalised, ranging from requirements over design and Hoare-style conditions on code to the implementation itself. The framework can be used to verify consistency of different UML diagrams both horizontally (e.g., consistency among various requirements) as well as vertically (e.g., correctness of design or implementation w.r.t. the requirements).