Matching and Merging of Statecharts Specifications

Abstract

Model Management addresses the problem of managing an evolving collection of models, by capturing the relationships between models and providing well-defined operators to manipulate them. In this paper, we describe two such operators for manipulating hierarchical Statecharts: Match, for finding correspondences between models, and Merge, for combining models with respect to known correspondences between them. Our Match operator is heuristic, making use of both static and behavioural properties of the models to improve the accuracy of matching. Our Merge operator preserves the hierarchical structure of the input models, and handles differences in behaviour through parameterization. In this way, we automatically construct merges that preserve the semantics of Statecharts models. We illustrate and evaluate our work by applying our operators to AT&T telecommunication features.

Diagnosing and Measuring Incompatibilities between Pairs of Services

“…-It is arguably the simplest and most widely understood model of system behaviour and it has been used in several previous work in the area of behavioural service interface analysis [6,4,15]. -It is sufficiently powerful to capture most forms of behaviour encountered in service interfaces, including race conditions and interleaved parallelism.…”

“…In [15], authors propose an operator match which is a similarity function comparing two interfaces for finding correspondences between models. This function is the same as the one introduced in [18] which consider the behavioural semantics.…”

Guided Merging of Sequence Diagrams

“…Such a conflict pattern might be equiped with a reconciliation strategy for resolving the conflict. In [17] an approach for merging two state machines is presented. This approach exploits syntactical as well as semantical information provided by the models in order to compare variants and perform consistency checks.…”

A Foundational Approach for Managing Process Variability

“…Identification of best practices or reducing of the number of process variants among the municipalities can be seen as driven factors for process harmonisation. This requires the identification of semantically corresponding activities of different process models based on linguistic or structural analysis [19,20,21]. Those techniques may reveal that the activity 'Sign Birth Certificate' in model (I) corresponds to the activity 'Issue Birth Certificate' in model (II).…”