Hierarchical multimodel-based structural consistency support tools for specifying and prototyping complex systems

When prototyping the requirement specifications of a large and complex system, it is very difficult to express them in a single model containing all the features. It is often disastrous if the requirement specifications are prototyped in a single level or single window of a single model. Hence multimodel based hierarchical requirement specifications are desirable in order to fully specify large and complex systems. But multimodel based hierarchical requirement specifications tools are then confronted with verification problems for inter model consistency and syntactic correctness. We introduce a predefined graphical structural syntax checker called Model Hierarchy Definition (MHD) which provides interactive hierarchy syntax checking during modeling the structured requirement specifications and predefined lowest level graphical formalisms called Model Hierarchy Model (MHM), defining the meta rules, the graphical diagramming entity and the hierarchical relationship for MHD embedding in the prototyping models. Having MHD and the MHM in the prototyping environment, one obtains higher quality structured requirement specifications when building hierarchical multimodel based prototypes for complex system analysis, and greatly reduces the prototyping time and costs. The MHD and MHM were implemented to support an integrated graphical prototyping system, which we overview, called the Prototyper´s Workbench (PWB) for rapid prototyping and analysis of software requirement specifications of target systems