Required Behavior of Sequence Diagrams: Semantics and Conformance

TL;DR

This paper introduces a formal semantics and conformance relation for UML sequence diagrams, enabling precise reasoning about required behaviors and ensuring correct reuse of design patterns and aspects.

Contribution

It provides a novel trace semantics for sequence diagrams and formalizes conformance, addressing a gap in reasoning about behavior reuse in software design.

Findings

Trace semantics accurately captures required behaviors.

Conformance relation is formally defined and analyzed.

Properties of semantics and conformance are established.

Abstract

Sequence diagrams are a widely used design notation for describing software behaviors. Many reusable software artifacts such as design patterns and design aspects make use of sequence diagrams to describe interaction behaviors. When a pattern or an aspect is reused in an application, it is important to ensure that the sequence diagrams for the application conform to the corresponding sequence diagrams for the pattern or aspect. Reasoning about conformance relationship between sequence diagrams has not been addressed adequately in literature. In this paper, we focus on required behavior specified by a UML sequence diagram. A novel trace semantics is given that captures precisely required behavior specified by a sequence diagram and a conformance relation between sequence diagrams is formalized based on the semantics. Properties of the trace semantics and the conformance relation are studied.