Validating UML schemas with OCL constraints and operations

Abstract

A conceptual schema specifies the relevant information about the domain, and how this information changes as a result of the execution of operations. The purpose of validating a conceptual schema is to check whether it specifies what the designer intended. This task is not fully formalizable, so it is desirable to provide the designer with a set of tools that assist him or her in the validation process. To this end, we present a method to translate a complete schema into logic, and then propose a set of validation tests that can be performed on the schema. These tests are formulated in such a way that any reasoning method can be used to check them. To show the feasibility of our approach, we use an implementation of an existing reasoning method.