Generating operation specifications from UML class diagrams: A model transformation approach

  • Authors:

  • Manoli Albert;Jordi Cabot;Cristina Gómez;Vicente Pelechano

  • Affiliations:

  • Departmento de Sistemas Informáticos y Computación, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Camino de Vera s/n 46022 Valencia, Spain;INRIA-ícole des Mines de Nantes, 4, rue Alfred Kastler, B.P. 20722 - F-44307 NANTES Cedex 3, France;Departament d'Enginyeria de Serveis i Sistemes d'Informació, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Campus Nord, Edif. Omega, Jordi Girona 1-3, 08034 Barcelona, Spain;Departmento de Sistemas Informáticos y Computación, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Camino de Vera s/n 46022 Valencia, Spain

  • Venue:
  • Data & Knowledge Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

One of the more tedious and complex tasks during the specification of conceptual schemas (CSs) is modeling the operations that define the system behavior. This paper aims to simplify this task by providing a method that automatically generates a set of basic operations that complement the static aspects of the CS and suffice to perform all typical life-cycle create/update/delete changes on the population of the elements of the CS. Our method guarantees that the generated operations are executable, i.e. their executions produce a consistent state wrt the most typical structural constraints that can be defined in CSs (e.g. multiplicity constraints). In particular, our method takes as input a CS expressed as a Unified Modeling Language (UML) class diagram (optionally defined using a profile to enrich the specification of associations) and generates an extended version of the CS that includes all necessary operations to start operating the system. If desired, these basic operations can be later used as building blocks for creating more complex ones. We show the formalization and implementation of our method by means of model-to-model transformations. Our approach is particularly relevant in the context of Model Driven Development approaches.