Leveraging the power of formal methods in the realm of enterprise modeling—On the example of extending the (meta) model verification possibilities of ADOxx with Alloy

Verification in the realm of enterprise modeling (EM) ensures both the consistency of EM language specifications (i.e., meta models and additional well-formedness constraints), as well as of enterprise models. The consistency of enterprise models, which integrate different perspectives on an enterprise, ensures that they contain the necessary, in line with domain-specific rules, information for carrying out a variety of model-driven enterprise analyses. Meta modeling platforms are instrumental in carrying out such verification, especially when multiple languages are applied in tandem, as is inherent to enterprise modeling.

This paper reports on our practical experiences of using formal methods for verification in the context of EM. Motivated by the required verification capabilities, we show for one example platform, ADOxx, how it can be chained together with Alloy, an example of lightweight formal method, to capitalize on complementary platform strengths. Namely, ADOxx for language specification and use, and Alloy for verification capabilities. We show the verification, both, on the meta model level, in terms of checking the consistency of language specifications, and on the model level, in terms of checking models against well-formedness constraints. We illustrate the chaining of ADOxx and Alloy on the basis of consistency checks of two languages applied in tandem, namely the value modeling language e3value and the IT infrastructure modeling language, ITML. We also carry out experiments with three further languages to reflect upon the performance of Alloy, and its capability to uncover inconsistencies.