UML for electronic systems design: a comprehensive overview

2012 Design, Automation &Amp; Test in Europe Conference &Amp; Exhibition (DATE)

Drechsler

2012

Abstract-While being a de-facto standard for the modeling of software systems, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) is also increasingly used in the domain of hardware design and hardware/software co-design. To ensure the correctness of the specified systems, approaches have been presented which automatically verify whether a UML model is consistent, i.e. free of conflicts. However, if the model is inconsistent, these approaches do not provide further information to assist the designer in finding the error.In this work, we present an automatic debugging approach which determines contradiction candidates, i.e. a small subset of the original model explaining the conflict. These contradiction candidates aid the designer in finding the error faster and therefore accelerate the whole design process. The approach employs different satisfiability solvers as well as different debugging strategies. Experimental results demonstrate that, even for large UML models with up to 2500 classes and constraints, the approach determines a very small number of contradiction candidates to be inspected.

Section: • Reflexive Binary Associationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…With the ongoing trend towards the design at the Electronic System Level (ESL), UML also offers promising applications in the domain of hardware design and hardware/software codesign [2]. The desired system can initially be specified at a high level of abstraction, before precise implementation steps are performed.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Debugging of inconsistent UML/OCL models

2012 Design, Automation &Amp; Test in Europe Conference &Amp; Exhibition (DATE)

Drechsler

2012

“…6(a) shows the variables and the constraints needed to encode a system state σ t which is derived from the class diagram introduced in Example 4. In this object diagram, one object for the class TrafficLight and two objects for the class Button are instantiated 2 . A satisfying assignment of this instance is shown in Fig.…”

Section: Encoding Of System States and Their Ocl Invariantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…With increasing complexity of today's hardware systems, researchers also investigated the integration of UML in the design of hardware, e.g. embedded systems [2], [3]. In the context of hardware/software co-design, systems are specified first on a high level of abstraction, before partitioned into respective hardware-and software-components in a later step.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Verifying dynamic aspects of UML models

2011 Design, Automation &Amp; Test in Europe

Drechsler

2011

Abstract-The Unified Modeling Language (UML) as a defacto standard for software development finds more and more application in the design of systems which also contain hardware components. Guaranteeing the correctness of a system specified in UML is thereby an important as well as challenging task. In recent years, first approaches for this purpose have been introduced. However, most of them focus only on the static view of a UML model.In this paper, an automatic approach is presented which checks verification tasks for dynamic aspects of a UML model. That is, given a UML model as well as an initial system state, the approach proves whether a sequence of operation calls exists so that a desired behavior is invoked. The underlying verification problem is encoded as an instance of the satisfiability problem and subsequently solved using a SAT Modulo Theory solver. An experimental evaluation confirms the applicability of the proposed approach.

“…Furthermore, a UML model representing an arbiter has been taken from [16]. Another model (namely simple-cpu) represents a simple CPU.…”

Section: Experimental Evaluationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Verifying UML/OCL models using Boolean satisfiability

2010 Design, Automation &Amp; Test in Europe Conference &Amp; Exhibition (DATE 2010)

Kuhlmann

et al. 2010

Abstract-Nowadays, modeling languages like UML are essential in the design of complex software systems and also start to enter the domain of hardware and hardware/software codesign. Due to shortening time-to-market demands, "first time right" requirements have thereby to be satisfied. In this paper, we propose an approach that makes use of Boolean satisfiability for verifying UML/OCL models. We describe how the respective components of a verification problem, namely system states of a UML model, OCL constraints, and the actual verification task, can be encoded and afterwards automatically solved using an offthe-shelf SAT solver. Experiments show that our approach can solve verification tasks significantly faster than previous methods while still supporting a large variety of UML/OCL constructs.