Inheritance conditions for object life cycle diagrams

Inheritance is the main principle in object-oriented design methods to support structuring and reuse of object behaviour descriptions. Most proposals restrict the formal use of inheritance to method interfaces and method effect specifcations. We propose to extend the inheritance relation to cover whole object life cycles, i.e. to long term object behaviour. After sketching the basic idea of inheriting object life cycles, we give inheritance conditions and inheritance-preserving construction operators for a specific graphical notation for specifying life cycles.