An OCL-based verification approach to analyzing static properties of a UML model.

There is a need for more rigorous analysis techniques that developers can use for verifying the critical properties in UML models. The UML-based Specification Environment (USE) tool supports verification of invariants, preconditions, and postconditions specified in the Object Constraint Language (OCL), which is useful when checking critical properties. However, the USE requires one to specify a model using its own textual language and does not allow one to import any model specification files created by other UML modeling tools. Hence, we often create a model with OCL constraints using a modeling tool such as the IBM Rational Software Architect (RSA) and then use the USE for the model verification. This approach, however, requires a manual transformation between two different specification formats, which diminishes the benefit of model-level verification. In this thesis, we describe our own implementation of a specification transformation engine based on the Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) framework.