15893082
Adding pattern related information in structural and behavioral diagrams
Abstract Design patterns capture the distilled experience of expert designers. The compositions of design patterns may reuse design experience and solve a set of problems. Design patterns and their compositions are usually modeled using unified modeling language (UML). When a design pattern is applied or composed with other patterns, the pattern-related information may be lost because UML does not track this information. Thus, it is hard for a designer to identify a design pattern when it is applied or composed. The benefits of design patterns are compromised because the designers cannot communicate with each other in terms of the design patterns they use when the design patterns are applied or composed. In this paper, we present notations to explicitly represent the structural and behavioral aspects of each pattern in the applications and compositions of design patterns. The notations allow us to maintain pattern-related information in class and collaboration diagrams. Thus, a design pattern is identifiable and traceable from its application and composition with others in these diagrams. A case study is used to illustrate our approach.
16769256
A model transformation approach for design pattern evolutions
The evolution of a design pattern typically involves the addition or removal of a group of modeling elements, such as classes, attributes, operations, and relationships. However, the possible evolutions of each design pattern are often not explicitly documented. Missing part of the evolution process may result in inconsistent evolution. In this paper, we define the evolution processes of design patterns in terms of two-level transformations, thus making the possible evolutions of each design pattern explicit. In addition, we automate the evolution processes as XSLT transformations that can transform the UML model of a design pattern application into the evolved UML model of the pattern. Both the original and evolved UML models are represented in the XML metadata interchange (XMI) format to facilitate the transformations. Furthermore, we check the consistency of the evolution results using the Java Theorem Prover
26263616
Developing a Formal Design Analysis Framework
26328924
Model checking the composition of hypermedia design components
Component-based software development aims at building software system by assembling software components to reduce cost, risk and time-to-market. However, conflicts among components constitute a crucial barrier to successful software composition. In this paper, we present an approach to analyze the properties of components and their compositions in order to detect and correct composition errors. We also demonstrate how model checking can be used to verify properties about the composition of design components. Furthermore, using a hypermedia case study, we show how to represent, instantiate, and integrate design components, and how to find composition errors by applying model checking techniques.
17418612
Visualizing design patterns with a UML profile
In this paper, we present a UML profile which defines new stereotypes, tagged values and constraints for visualizing design patterns in UML diagrams. These new stereotypes and tagged values are attached to a modeling element to explicitly represent the role the modeling element plays in a design pattern so that the user can identify the pattern in a UML diagram.
9559762
A logical framework for design composition
The design of a large component based software system typically involves the composition of different components. The lack of rigorous reasoning about the correctness of composition is an important barrier towards the promise of "plug and play". The author describes a rigorous logic framework to reason about component compositions. We focus our analysis on design components such as design patterns, which have been used by a large number of applications. We also propose methods to verify structural and behavioral composition correctness.
8032652
Class Union and Polymorphism
15362726
State, event, time and diagram in system modeling
The design of complex systems requires powerful mechanisms for modeling state, concurrent events, and real-time behavior; as well as for visualising and structuring systems in order to control complexity. Methods integration has become a recent research trend in software specification and design. In the graphical area, many object-oriented methods have merged into one, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) which combines various diagrammatic modeling techniques to model static and dynamic aspects of software systems. Although traditional formal methods have not scale-up well, new integrated formal methods show great promise. This tutorial will present the state of the art in formal modeling techniques (state-based Object-Z and event-based Timed CSP), their integration (TCOZ), and transformation techniques from the integrated formalism to UML diagrams. An XML web environment for projecting integrated formal models to UML diagrams will also be demonstrated.
5467078
Software modeling techniques and the semantic Web
Following the success of XML, W3C envisions the semantic Web (Berners-Lee et al., 2001) as the next generation of Web in which data are given well-defined and machine-understandable semantics so that they can be processed by intelligent software agents. Semantic Web can be regarded as an emerging area from the knowledge representation and the Web communities. The software engineering community can also play an important role in the semantic Web development. Modeling and verification techniques can be useful at many stages during the design, maintenance and deployment of semantic Web ontology. We believe semantic Web will be a new research and application domain for software modeling techniques and tools. For example, recent research results have shown that UML, Z (Woodcock and Davis, 1996) and Alloy (Jackson, 2002) can provide modeling, reasoning and consistency checking services for semantic Web.
6980198
A combined approach to checking web ontologies
The understanding of Semantic Web documents is built upon ontologies that define concepts and relationships of data. Hence, the correctness of ontologies is vital. Ontology reasoners such as RACER and FaCT have been developed to reason ontologies with a high degree of automation. However, complex ontology-related properties may not be expressible within the current web ontology languages, consequently they may not be checkable by RACER and FaCT. We propose to use the software engineering techniques and tools, i.e., Z/EVES and Alloy Analyzer, to complement the ontology tools for checking Semantic Web documents.In this approach, Z/EVES is first applied to remove trivial syntax and type errors of the ontologies. Next, RACER is used to identify any ontological inconsistencies, whose origins can be traced by Alloy Analyzer. Finally Z/EVES is used again to express complex ontology-related properties and reveal errors beyond the modeling capabilities of the current web ontology languages. We have successfully applied this approach to checking a set of military plan ontologies.
13839820
Relating /spl pi/-calculus to Object-Z
Software systems have become increasingly distributed, dynamic and mobile. The complex state and dynamic interfaces of software components and their concurrent interactions provide challenging research issues in system specification and design. An effective combination of structured state-based formalism and dynamic action-based calculus may be a good solution for modeling complex distributed mobile systems. In this paper, we investigate the semantic links between Object-Z and /spl pi/ calculus and consequently introduce a powerful specification technique PiOZ that brings the strengths of the two together. The operational semantics of PiOZ integrates state transition semantics of Object-Z and /spl pi/-calculus reduction rules. The typing rules of PiOZ are developed and reasoning of a system property is presented.