A Model Checking Based Approach for Containment Checking of UML Sequence Diagrams

Abstract

The main challenge in software development process is to detect and fix the deviations of system's behaviors at different abstraction levels in early phases. For this purpose, UML 2 sequence diagrams are widely used for describing and analyzing the communication behavior of software systems. This paper describes a containment checking approach for UML 2 sequence diagrams to verify whether the behavior (or functions) described by a low-level model conforms those specified in the high-level counterpart based on model checking techniques, in order to improve the system's quality. However, creating consistency constraints and formal specifications for the sequence diagrams is a labor-intensive and error prone task. To alleviate this issue, we propose an automated transformation of sequence diagrams into formal specifications and consistency constraints that enable us to leverage the analytical powers of model checking to automatically verify the containment relationship. In addition, our approach provides the stakeholders more informative and comprehensive feedbacks regarding the inconsistency issues, and therefore helps them to efficiently identify and resolve the problems. The approach is implemented and validated using three realistic scenarios.