Towards Formal Verification Of Model Transformations

As the Unified Modeling Language is evolving into a family of languages with individually specified semantics, there is an increasing need for highly automated and provenly correct model transformations that would assure the integration of local views of the system (in the form of different diagrams) into a consistent global view. Graph transformation provides an easy-to-understand visual specification technique to formally capture the rules of such transformations. In the paper, we summarize the concepts of VIATRA, the general purpose model transformation system together with the major correctness requirements and a model checking based verification method for model transformations. Nowadays, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) has become the dominating specification and modeling language for the design process of software. However, despite its industrial success as being a unified and visual notation, the impreciseness of UML (i.e., the lack of formal semantics) is still the major factor that hinders the general use of UML as a primary source language for (i) automated tools of formal verification and validation exploiting the results in the theory of formal methods, and (ii) automated code generators that would yield a provenly correct functional core of target application. Recent initiatives (UML 2.0 Request for Proposal) of the Object Management Group (OMG) aim at to re-architecture the single and monolith language ¢