Temporal OCL Meeting Specification Demands for Business Components

INTRODUCTION Compositional plug-and-play-like reuse of black box components requires sophisticated techniques to specify components, especially if we combine third-party components, which are traded on component markets, to customer-individual business application systems. As in established engineering disciplines like mechanical engineering or electrical engineering, we need a formal documentation of business components that becomes part of contractual agreements. Taking this problem as a starting point, we explain the general layered structure of software contracts for business components and show shortcomings of common specification approaches. Furthermore, we introduce a formal notation for the specification of business components that extends the Object Constraint Language (OCL) and that allows a broader use of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) with respect to the layered structure of software contracts for business components. The remainder of the chapter is as follows. After providing background information in the next section, we discuss the necessity of a multi-level notation standard. Thereafter, we explain how the OCL can be used to specify business components. Taking this as a basis, we proceed to the main thrust of our chapter the temporal extension of OCL. Finally, we present our conclusions and give an outlook.