A Language-theoretic View on Guidelines and Consistency Rules of UML

TL;DR

This paper introduces C-Systems, a formal language-theoretic framework for representing and automatically checking UML guidelines and consistency rules, enabling compile-time validation of UML models.

Contribution

It formalizes UML guidelines and rules as controlling grammars within a novel C-System framework, allowing automated, syntax-based validation.

Findings

Formalizes guidelines as controlling grammars

Enables automatic, compile-time checking of UML models

Provides a parser implementation for validation

Abstract

Guidelines and consistency rules of UML are used to control the degrees of freedom provided by the language to prevent faults. Guidelines are used in specific domains (e.g., avionics) to recommend the proper use of technologies. Consistency rules are used to deal with inconsistencies in models. However, guidelines and consistency rules use informal restrictions on the uses of languages, which makes checking difficult. In this paper, we consider these problems from a language-theoretic view. We propose the formalism of C-Systems, short for "formal language control systems". A C-System consists of a controlled grammar and a controlling grammar. Guidelines and consistency rules are formalized as controlling grammars that control the uses of UML, i.e. the derivations using the grammar of UML. This approach can be implemented as a parser, which can automatically verify the rules on a UML user model in XMI format. A comparison to related work shows our contribution: a generic top-down and syntax-based approach that checks language level constraints at compile-time.