A Survey of Consistency Checking Techniques for UML Models

Abstract

UML is the de-facto industry standard to design object-oriented software. UML provides a set of diagrams to model every aspect of an object-oriented application design in sufficient detail, but lacks any mechanism to rigorously check consistency between the models. Today, most of the effort is applied on creating accurate and consistent UML models rather than implementing the design. Automatic code generation from UML models has emerged as a promising area in recent years. The accuracy of generated code in some ways depends on UML models consistency. In this paper, we present a survey of UML consistency checking techniques. To analyze existing techniques, we identify some analysis parameters and construct an analysis table. The analysis table helps us to evaluate existing consistency checking techniques. We conclude that most of the approaches validates intra and inter level consistencies between UML models by using monitoring strategy. UML class, sequence, and statechart diagrams are used in most of the existing consistency checking techniques.