Integrating and Rapid-Prototyping UML Structural and Behavioural Diagrams Using Rewriting Logic

Although the diversity of UML diagrams provides users with different views of any complex software under development, in most cases system designers face challenging problems to keeping such diagrams coherently related. In this paper we propose to contribute to the tremendous efforts being undertaken towards rigorous and coherent views of UML-based modelling techniques. In this sense, we propose to integrate most of UML diagrams in a very smooth yet sound way. Moreover, by equipping such integration with an intrinsically concurrent and operational semantics, namely rewriting logic, we also provide validation by rapid-prototyping using Maude implementations.More precisely, the diagrams we propose to smoothly integrate include: object- and class-diagrams with their related object constraints (using OCL), statecharts and life-cycle diagrams. The integration of such diagrams is based on very appealing Petri-net-like semi-graphical notations. As further advantages of the proposed integration we cite: (1) an explicit distinction between local features and observed ones in (the enriched) class-diagrams which offers a clean separation between intraand inter-class-diagram reasoning; and (2) a full exploitation of rewriting logic reflection capabilities for expressing different object-life cycles in a runtime way.