Section: Software

EMFtoCSP

URL: http://code.google.com/a/eclipselabs.org/p/emftocsp/

EMFtoCSP is a tool for the verification of precisely defined conceptual models and metamodels. For these models, the definition of the general model structure (using UML or EMF) is supplemented by OCL constraints. The Eclipse Modeling Development Tools (MDT (http://www.eclipse.org/modeling/mdt/?project=ocl )) provides mature tool support for such OCL-annotated models with respect to model definition, transformation, and validation.

However, an additional important task that is not supported by Eclipse MDT is the assurance of model quality. A systematical assessment of the correctness of such models is a key issue to ensure the quality of the final application. EMFtoCSP fills this gap by provided support for automated model verification in Eclipse.

Essentially, the EMFtoCSP is a sophisticated bounded model finder that yields instances of the model that conform not only to the structural definition of the model (e.g., the multiplicity constraints), but also to the OCL constraints. Based on this core, several correctness properties can be verified:

1. Satisfiability – is the model able to express our domain? For this check, the minimal number of instances and links can be specified to ensure non-trivial instances.

2. Unsatisfiability – is the model unable to express undesirable states? To verify this, we add further constraints to the model that state undesired conditions. Then we can check if is it impossible to instantiate the amended model.

3. Constraint subsumption – is one constraint already implied by others (and could therefore be removed)?

4. Constraint redundancy – do different constraints express the same fact (and could therefore be removed)?

To solve these search problems, EMFtoCSP translates the EMF/OCL (resp. UML/OCL) model into a constraint satisfaction problem and employs the Eclipse CLP solver (http://eclipseclp.org/ ) to solve it. This way, constraint propagation is exploited to tackle the (generally NP-hard) search.

The tool is a continuation of the UMLtoCSP approach [48] developed previously by Jordi Cabot, Robert Clarisó and Daniel Riera. It provides a generic plugin framework for Eclipse to solve OCL-annotated models using constraint logic programming. Apart from already supported Ecore and UML metamodels, further metamodels can be added easily in the future. Similarly, other constraint solving back-ends can be integrated. It is provided under the Eclipse Public License.