TY - JOUR
T1 - Assert and negate revisited
T2 - Modal semantics for UML sequence diagrams
AU - Harel, David
AU - Maoz, Shahar
N1 - Funding Information:
Preliminary version appeared in SCESM ’06: Proc. of the 2006 Int. workshop on Scenarios and State Machines, Shanghai, China (May 2006) [15]. This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant No.287/02-1), and by The John von Neumann Minerva Center for the Development of Reactive Systems at the Weizmann Institute of Science.
PY - 2008/5
Y1 - 2008/5
N2 - Live Sequence Charts (LSC) extend Message Sequence Charts (MSC), mainly by distinguishing possible from necessary behavior. They thus enable the specification of rich multi-modal scenario-based properties, such as mandatory, possible and forbidden scenarios. The sequence diagrams of UML 2.0 enrich those of previous versions of UML by two new operators, assert and negate, for specifying required and forbidden behaviors, which appear to have been inspired by LSC. The UML 2.0 semantics of sequence diagrams, however, being based on pairs of valid and invalid sets of traces, is inadequate, and prevents the new operators from being used effectively. We propose an extension of, and a different semanticsfor this UML language - Modal Sequence Diagrams (MSD ) - based on the universal/ existential modal semantics of LSC. In particular, in MSD assert and negate are really modalities, not operators. We define MSD as a UML 2.0 profile, thus paving the way to apply formal verification, synthesis, and scenario-based execution techniques from LSC to the mainstream UML standard.
AB - Live Sequence Charts (LSC) extend Message Sequence Charts (MSC), mainly by distinguishing possible from necessary behavior. They thus enable the specification of rich multi-modal scenario-based properties, such as mandatory, possible and forbidden scenarios. The sequence diagrams of UML 2.0 enrich those of previous versions of UML by two new operators, assert and negate, for specifying required and forbidden behaviors, which appear to have been inspired by LSC. The UML 2.0 semantics of sequence diagrams, however, being based on pairs of valid and invalid sets of traces, is inadequate, and prevents the new operators from being used effectively. We propose an extension of, and a different semanticsfor this UML language - Modal Sequence Diagrams (MSD ) - based on the universal/ existential modal semantics of LSC. In particular, in MSD assert and negate are really modalities, not operators. We define MSD as a UML 2.0 profile, thus paving the way to apply formal verification, synthesis, and scenario-based execution techniques from LSC to the mainstream UML standard.
KW - Formal semantics
KW - Livesequence charts
KW - Sequence diagrams
KW - Standardization
KW - UML Interactions
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=43449139187&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s10270-007-0054-z
DO - 10.1007/s10270-007-0054-z
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AN - SCOPUS:43449139187
SN - 1619-1366
VL - 7
SP - 237
EP - 252
JO - Software and Systems Modeling
JF - Software and Systems Modeling
IS - 2
ER -