Specification of temporal properties with OCL
Résumé
The Object Constraint Language (OCL) is widely used to express static constraints on models and object-oriented systems. However, the notion of dynamic constraints, controlling the system behavior over time, has not been natively supported. Such dynamic constraints are necessary to handle temporal and real-time properties of systems.
In this paper, we first add a temporal layer to the OCL language, based syntactically on Dwyer et al.'s specification patterns. We enrich it with formal scenario-based semantics and integrate it into the current Eclipse OCL plug-in. Second, we translate, with a compositional approach, OCL temporal properties into finite-state automata and we connect our framework to automatic test generators. This way, we create a bridge linking model driven engineering and usual formal methods.