Supporting automatic model inconsistency fixing

  • Authors:

  • Yingfei Xiong;Zhenjiang Hu;Haiyan Zhao;Hui Song;Masato Takeichi;Hong Mei

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan;National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan;Peking University, Beijing, China;Peking University, Beijing, China;University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan;Peking University, Beijing, China

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the the 7th joint meeting of the European software engineering conference and the ACM SIGSOFT symposium on The foundations of software engineering
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Modern development environments often involve models with complex consistency relations. Some of the relations can be automatically established through "fixing procedures". When users update some parts of the model and cause inconsistency, a fixing procedure dynamically propagates the update to other parts to fix the inconsistency. Existing fixing procedures are manually implemented, which requires a lot of efforts and the correctness of a fixing procedure is not guaranteed. In this paper we propose a new language, Beanbag, to support the development of fixing procedures. A Beanbag program defines and checks a consistency relation similarly to OCL, but the program can also be executed in a fixing mode, taking user updates on the model and producing new updates to make the model satisfy the consistency relation. In this way Beanbag significantly eases the development of fixing procedures. In addition, a Beanbag program is also guaranteed to be correct with respect to the three correctness properties we define. We evaluate Beanbag over a set of MOF and UML consistency relations and the result shows that Beanbag is useful in practice.