Enabling automated analysis through the formalization of object-oriented modeling diagrams

As the impact of and demand for software increases, there is greater need for rigorous software development techniques that can be used by a typical software engineer. In order to integrate informal and formal approaches to software development, we added formal syntax and semantics definitions to existing object-oriented modeling notations. This formalization enables developers to construct object-oriented models of requirements and designs and then automatically generate formal specifications for the diagrams. This paper describes how the resulting diagrams via their specifications can be analyzed using automated techniques to validate behavior through simulation or to check for numerous properties of the diagrams, including inter- and intramodel consistency