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Specification of invariability in OCL

Specifying invariable system parts and views

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  • Published: 05 October 2011
  • Volume 12, pages 415–434, (2013)
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Specification of invariability in OCL
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  • Piotr Kosiuczenko1 

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Abstract

The Object Constraint Language (OCL) is a high-level, object-oriented language for contractual system specifications. Despite its expressivity, OCL does not provide primitives for a compact specification of invariability. In this paper, problems with invariability specification are listed and some weaknesses of existing solutions are pointed out. The question of invariability specification is addressed and a simple but expressive extension of OCL is proposed. It allows a view-oriented specification of invariability constraints, whereby we restrict the notion of view to reducts based on order-sorted algebras. The semantics of this extension is defined in terms of standard OCL.

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This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

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  1. Institute of Information Systems, WAT, Warsaw, Poland

    Piotr Kosiuczenko

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Communicated by Prof. Martin Gogolla.

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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

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Kosiuczenko, P. Specification of invariability in OCL. Softw Syst Model 12, 415–434 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-011-0215-y

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  • Received: 21 May 2008

  • Revised: 22 June 2011

  • Accepted: 02 September 2011

  • Published: 05 October 2011

  • Issue Date: May 2013

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-011-0215-y

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Keywords

  • OCL
  • UML
  • Invariability
  • Frame problem
  • Views
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