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Towards Extending the Validation Possibilities of ADOxx with Alloy

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The Practice of Enterprise Modeling (PoEM 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 400))

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Abstract

While ADOxx is a popular platform for the creation and use of enterprise modeling languages, it provides only limited support for a well-formedness check of created enterprise models. In this paper, we propose to complement the meta modeling platform ADOxx with Alloy, which natively provides extensive model checking capabilities, so as to enable a well-formedness check of enterprise models created in ADOxx.

Using the \(e^{3}{value}\) modeling language as a point of departure, we particularly provide (a) a partial ADOxx implementation of \(e^{3}{value}\), (b) a proof-of-concept XML2Alloy parser, which allows for converting \(e^{3}{value}\) models created in ADOxx into Alloy format, so that (c) \(e^{3}{value}\) well-formedness constraints stated in Alloy can be used to check the validity of an \(e^{3}{value}\) model with the Alloy Evaluator. Beyond the specific proof-of-concept, we also discuss further possibilities of using ADOxx in conjunction with Alloy, particularly in checking the soundness of meta models underlying an enterprise modeling language.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    ADOxx has been used (1) by business to realize various products, e.g., ADONIS, (2) by researchers/academia, cf. the Open Models community at OMiLAB [5], as well as (3) in various European research projects, cf. [7].

  2. 2.

    Please note that UML does not fully match the ADOxx meta meta model. For example, UML roles do not have a clear counterpart in ADOxx. As such their implementation requires a workaround.

  3. 3.

    AQL queries can be ad hoc formulated by a user, or pre-defined by a meta model developer in the Development Toolkit.

  4. 4.

    Fields in Alloy can define relations of any arity, not only just binary ones as in the case of ADOxx. In this paper, we introduce only the part of Alloy that is relevant for this work.

  5. 5.

    As stated, as far as we know, there is no counterpart to UML roles in the ADOxx development environment.

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Correspondence to Sybren de Kinderen .

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de Kinderen, S., Ma, Q., Kaczmarek-Heß, M. (2020). Towards Extending the Validation Possibilities of ADOxx with Alloy. In: Grabis, J., Bork, D. (eds) The Practice of Enterprise Modeling. PoEM 2020. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 400. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63479-7_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63479-7_10

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