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A formal approach to model refactoring and model refinement

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Abstract

Model-driven engineering is an emerging software engineering approach that relies on model transformation. Typical kinds of model transformations are model refinement and model refactoring. Whenever such a transformation is applied to a consistent model, we would like to know whether the consistency is preserved by the transformation. Therefore, in this article, we formally define and explore the relation between behaviour inheritance consistency of a refined model with respect to the original model, and behaviour preservation of a refactored model with respect to the original model. As it turns out, there is a strong similarity between these notions of behaviour consistency and behaviour preservation. To illustrate this claim, we formalised the behaviour specified by UML 2.0 sequence and protocol state machine diagrams. We show how the reasoning capabilities of description logics, a decidable fragment of first-order logic, can be used in a natural way to detect behaviour inconsistencies. These reasoning capabilities can be used in exactly the same way to detect behaviour preservation violations during model refactoring. A prototype plug-in in a UML CASE tool has been developed to validate our claims.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. System and Software Engineering Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, 1050, Brussel, Belgium

    Ragnhild Van Der Straeten & Viviane Jonckers

  2. Service de Génie Logiciel, Université de Mons-Hainaut, Av. du Champs de Mars 6, 7000, Mons, Belgium

    Tom Mens

Authors
  1. Ragnhild Van Der Straeten
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  2. Viviane Jonckers
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  3. Tom Mens
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Correspondence to Ragnhild Van Der Straeten.

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Communicated by Ana Moreira and Thomas Baar.

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Van Der Straeten, R., Jonckers, V. & Mens, T. A formal approach to model refactoring and model refinement. Softw Syst Model 6, 139–162 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-006-0025-9

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