Defining and verifying behaviour of domain specific language with fUML

Abstract

The behavioural semantics of a Domain Specific Language (DSL) are the instructions on how to execute the language. In practice, such semantics are often documented by text, which leads to ambiguity and tool generation problems. Although some formal frameworks have been proposed to address these drawbacks, they only allow the correctness of a specification to be tested at a later stage, usually when the semantics are implemented. This paper presents a new framework for implementing the behavioural semantics of meta-model based DSLs and tools. The framework uses the foundational subset of executable UML (fUML) as its semantic base, and uses the fUML meta-model for modelling the abstract syntax and operational semantics of a DSL. The semantics specification can be verified at design time without the need to execute behaviour models. Thus, it can provide useful feedback to the DSL designer. The framework is demonstrated in a Petri-net example.