One of the more tedious and complex tasks during the specification of domain/conceptual schemas (CS) is modeling the operations that define the system behavior.

This paper aims to simplify this task by providing a method that automatically generates a set of basic operations that complement the static aspects of the CS and suffice to perform all typical life-cycle create/update/delete (CRUD) changes on the population of the elements of the CS.

Our method guarantees that the generated operations are executable, i.e. their executions produce a consistent state wrt the most typical structural constraints that can be defined in CSs (e.g. multiplicity constraints).

In particular, our method takes as input a CS expressed as a Unified Modeling Language (UML) class diagram (optionally defined using a profile to enrich the specification of associations) and generates an extended version of the CS that includes all necessary operations to start operating the system. If desired, these basic operations can be later used as building blocks for creating more complex ones. We show the formalization and implementation of our method by means of model-to-model transformations.

The paper builds on the idea of the 80/20 rule (pareto principle) applied to MDD to automatically generate basic operations for class diagrams. In this work, we improve the generation strategy by adding conditions and/or compensation actions to ensure that the execution of the operations always leaves the data in a consistent state. This work improves the productivity of modeling by using “common sense” to deduce what operations will be most likely needed in the system depending on the data that the system needs to manipulate. Operations are described using a kind of Executable UML .

You can read our Generating operation specifications from UML class diagrams: A model transformation approach (together with Manoli Albert, Cristina Gómez and Vicente Pelechano) work directly from the publisher’s website or directly download our free paper copy

Jordi Cabot

ICREA Research Professor at Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (UOC). Leader of the SOM Research Lab focusing on the broad area of systems and software engineering. Home page.