Contracts for Multi-instance UML Activities

• Main Authors: Slåtten, Vidar, Herrmann, Peter
• Other Authors: Norwegian University of Science and Technology Trondheim (NTNU), Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Roberto Bruni, Juergen Dingel, TC 6, WG 6.1
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2011
• Subjects: [INFO]Computer Science [cs]; [INFO.INFO-NI]Computer Science [cs]/Networking and Internet Architecture [cs.NI]; Iceland
• Online Access: https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01583314; https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01583314/document; https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01583314/file/978-3-642-21461-5_20_Chapter.pdf; https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21461-5_20

International audience We present a novel way of encapsulating UML activities using interface contracts, which allows to verify functional properties that depend on the synchronization of parallel instances of software components. Encapsulated UML activities can be reused together with their verification results in SPACE, a model-driven engineering method for reactive systems. Such compositional verification significantly improves the scalability of the method. Employing a small example of a load balancing system, we explain the semantics of the contracts using the temporal logic TLA. Thereafter, we propose a more easily comprehensible graphical notation and clarify that the contracts are able to express the variants of multiplicity that we can encounter using UML activities. Finally, we give the results of verifying some properties of the example system using the TLC model checker.