Specification and Checking of Dependency Relations between UML Models

Abstract

During the object-oriented software development process, a variety of models of the system is built. All of these models are not independent; they are related to each other. Elements in one model have trace dependencies to other models; they are semantically overlapping and together represent the system as a whole. It is necessary to have a precise definition of the syntax and semantics of the different models and their relationships since the lack of accuracy in definition can lead to wrong model interpretations and inconsistency between models. In this chapter, we classify relationships between models along three different dimensions and propose a formal description of them. The goal of the proposed formalization is to provide formal foundations for tools that perform intelligent analysis on models thereby assisting software engineers throughout the development process. In this direction, we discuss the construction of a tool based on the formalization and support the verification of traces between requirement and analysis models specified in the Unified Modeling Language.