Automated Composition of Sequence Diagrams via Alloy
Mohammed Alwanain, Behzad Bordbar, Juliana Bowles · 2014
Design of large systems often involves the creation of models that describe partial specifications. Model composition is the process of combining partial models to create a single coherent model. This paper presents an automatic composition technique for creating a sequence diagram from partial specifications captured in multiple sequence diagrams with the help of Alloy. Our contribution is twofold: a novel true-concurrent semantics for sequence diagram composition, and a model-driven transformation of sequence diagrams onto Alloy that preserves the semantics of composition defined. We have created a tool called SD2Alloy that implements the automated technique and works as follows: two given sequence diagrams are transformed in two Alloy models, and then combined according to a set of logical constraints, determined by our compositional semantics, into a final composed Alloy model. The technique can also be used to detect problems and inconsistencies in the composition of diagrams.