Formalizing the Evaluation of OCL Constraints

Domain-specific modeling has growing importance in many fields of softwareenginering, such as modeling control flows of data processing, or in man-machine systems.Customizable language dictionary and customizable notations of the model elementsoffered by domain-specific technologies make software systems easier to create andmaintain. However, visual model definitions have a tendency to be incomplete, orimprecise; the definitions can be extended by textual constraints attached to the modelitems. Textual constraints can eliminate the incompleteness stemming from the limitationsof the structural definition as well. The Object Constraint Language (OCL) is one of themost popular constraint languages in the field of UML and Domain Specific ModelingLanguages. OCL is a flexible, yet formal language with a mathematical background.Existing formalisms of OCL does not describe dynamic behavior of constraints. Ourresearch aims at creating an OCL optimization solution and prove its correctness formally.However, the shortcomings of the existing formalism has led us to create a new formalism.The paper presents OCLASM, a new formalism for OCL, which can describe both thesemantics and the dynamical behavior of the language constructs, thus, it is capable ofdescribing proofs of optimization algortihms. OCLASM is based on the Abstract StateMachines technique.