Management of UML Clusters

Software engineering uses UML diagrams as a standard technique for specification and development of software. Various UML diagrams are used for specification of different aspects of the application. Their interpretation, extension, revision and integration becomes awful difficult if developers use the full freedom of UML, apply their own semantics and do not agree an common parts. We propose an approach that limits this freedom to the necessary extend. Developers have the full freedom on parts of the specification that is independent from others and are committed to fulfill contracts on parts of the specification that is also used by other developers. Due to a lack of semantics the integration of various UML diagrams is often left to the intuition of software engineers, which bears the risk of UML-based software development becoming error-prone. In this paper we propose the use of Abstract State Machines (ASMs) as a means to support the integration of UML diagrams by means of invertible translations of UML clusters, i.e. sets of UML diagrams together with constraints defined on them, into easily understandable ASM specifications. In doing so, the rigorous semantics of ASMs induces an unambiguous semantics for the UML clusters. These translations themselves can be formalised by ASM specifications thereby automating the translation process. Furthermore, the evolution of UML clusters is guarded by contracts, which can again by specified by ASMs.