Publikation
Eliminating Invariants in UML/OCL Models
Mathias Soeken; Robert Wille; Rolf Drechsler
In: Conference Proceedings. Design, Automation & Test in Europe (DATE-12), March 12-16, Dresden, Germany, 2012.
Zusammenfassung
In model-based design, it is common and helpful to
use invariants in order to highlight restrictions or to formulate
characteristics of a design. In contrast to pre- and post-conditions,
they represent global constraints. That is, they are harder to
explicitly consider and, thus, become disadvantageous when
the design process approaches the implementation phase. As a
consequence, they should be removed from a design when it
comes to an implementation. However, so far only naïve tool
support aiding the designer in this task is available.
In this paper, we present an approach which addresses this
problem. A methodology is proposed which iteratively removes
invariants from a model and, afterwards, presents the designer
with invalid scenarios originally prevented by the just eliminated
invariant. Using this, the designer can either manually modify
the model or simply take the automatically generated suggestion.
This enables to entirely eliminate all invariants without changing
the semantics of the model. Case studies illustrate the applicability
of the proposed approach.