Authors:
Alessandro Gerlinger Romero
1
;
Klaus Schneider
2
and
Maurício Gonçalves Vieira Ferreira
1
Affiliations:
1
Brazilian National Institute for Space Research, Brazil
;
2
University of Kaiserslautern, Germany
Keyword(s):
Base Semantics, fUML, UML, Alf, Formal Methods, Theorem Proving, Verification.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Applications and Software Development
;
Executable UML
;
Languages, Tools and Architectures
;
Model-Driven Software Development
;
Reasoning about Models
;
Software Engineering
;
Syntax and Semantics of Modeling Languages
Abstract:
The lack of formal foundations of UML results in imprecise models since UML only defines graphical notations,
but not their formal semantics. However, in safety-critical applications, formal semantics is a requirement
for verification. Semantics for the key parts of activities and classes of UML is defined by the semantics
of a foundational subset for executable UML models (fUML). Moreover, the base semantics given by fUML
defines the formal semantics of UML. In this paper, we evaluate a subset of the base semantics given by
fUML covering its formal definition and its use for verification. From the practical perspective, we show with
a simple example how the base semantics can support formal verification through theorem proving. The initial
results show that the base semantics, when mature, can play an important role in the formal verification of
UML models.