Verifying consistency between structural and behavioral schemas in UML
Elena Planas · LA Referencia (Red Federada de Repositorios Institucionales de Publicaciones Científicas) · 2008
The specification of an information system must include all relevant static and dynamic aspects of the domain. The static aspects are collected in structural diagrams that are represented in UML by means of class diagrams. Dynamic aspects are usually specified by means of a behavioral schema consisting of a set of system operations (composed by actions) that the user may execute to query and/or modify the information modeled in the class diagram. Behavioral schemas must be consistent with regard to structural schemas. Consistency between both schemas means that the set of system operations provided by designers must be syntactically consistent (i.e, the operation specifications conform to a particular syntax), executable (i.e, for each operation there must exist a system state over which the operation can be successfully applied), complete (i.e, through these operations, users should be able to modify the population of all modifiable elements in the class diagram) and non-redundant (i.e, there are not (partly) superfluous operations). The goal of this thesis is to give a method to determine the consistency between structural and behavioral schemas of an information system. Moreover, in case of inconsistent schemas the method must provide feedback information to allow designers modify their behavioral schemas in order to repair the inconsistency.