Authors:
Qinan Lai
and
Andy Carpenter
Affiliation:
The University of Manchester, United Kingdom
Keyword(s):
ALF, fUML, DSL, Modelling Language, Behavioural Semantics, Static Check.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Applications and Software Development
;
Domain-Specific Modeling and Domain-Specific Languages
;
Executable UML
;
Languages, Tools and Architectures
;
Model-Driven Software Development
;
Software Engineering
;
Syntax and Semantics of Modeling Languages
Abstract:
In model-driven software engineering, the syntax of a modelling language is defined as a meta-model, and its semantics is defined by some other formal languages. As the languages for defining syntax and semantics comes from different technology space, maintaining the correctness and consistency of a language specification is a challenging topic. Technologies on formal methods or sophisticated dynamic verification have been developed to verify a language specification. While these works are valuable, they can be hard to apply to a complex language in reality. In this paper, extended static checking and testing are used to maintain the correctness of a language specification, and the techniques are applied to a case study that formalises WS-BPEL to a model-based specification defined by OMG standard fUML and ALF. Several categories of different errors are identified which can happen during semantics development, and how our framework can simplify the checking on them by static checkin
g and direct testing of executable models is discussed.
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