Abstract
The Object Constraint Language is a textual specification language which forms part of the Unified Modelling Language[8]. Its principal uses are specifying constraints such as well-formedness conditions (e.g. in the definition of UML itself) and specifying contracts between parts of a system being modelled in UML. Focusing on the latter, we propose a systematic way to extend OCL with temporal constructs in order to express richer contracts. Our approach is based on observational mu-calculus, a two-level temporal logic in which temporal features at the higher level interact cleanly with a domain specific logic at the lower level. Using OCL as the lower level logic, we achieve much improved expressiveness in a modular way. We present a unified view of invariants and pre/post conditions, and we show how the framework can be used to permit the specification of liveness properties.
Work reported here was supported by the EPSRC grant GR/R16891, and EPSRC Advanced Fellowships held by Bradfield and Stevens.
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Bradfield, J., Filipe, J.K., Stevens, P. (2002). Enriching OCL Using Observational Mu-Calculus. In: Kutsche, RD., Weber, H. (eds) Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering. FASE 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2306. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45923-5_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45923-5_14
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