Design of a Railway Domain Profile and its OCL-based Validation

Abstract

Domain-specific languages become more and more important these days as they facilitate the close collaboration of domain experts and software developers. One effect of this general tendency is the increasing number of UML profiles. UML itself as the most popular modeling language is capable of modeling all kinds of systems but it is often inefficient due to its wide-spectrum approach. Profiles tailor the UML to a specific domain and can hence be seen as domain-specific dialects of UML. At the moment, profiles mainly introduce new terminology, often in combination with OCL constraints which describe the new constructs more precisely. As most tools do not support validation of OCL expressions let alone supplementing profiles with OCL constraints, it is difficult to check if models based on a profile comply to this profile. A related problem is checking whether constraints in the profile contradict constraints in the UML specification. In this paper, it is shown how to complete these tasks with the tool USE. As an example, a profile from the railway control systems domain is taken which describes the use of its modeling elements quite strictly. Models based on this profile serve as a foundation for automated code generation. Therefore, they require a rigorous and unambiguous meaning. OCL is heavily used to reach this goal.