Temporal Constraint Support for OCL

Abstract. The Object Constraint Language is widely used to express precise and unambiguous constraints on models and object oriented pro-grams. However, the notion of temporal constraints, controlling the sys-tem behavior over time, has not been natively supported. Such temporal constraints are necessary to model reactive and real-time systems. Al-though there are works addressing temporal extensions of OCL, they only bring syntactic extensions without any concrete implementation conforming to the OCL standard. On top of that, all of them are based on temporal logics that require particular skills to be used in practice. In this paper, we propose to fill in both gaps. We first enrich OCL by a pattern-based temporal layer which is then integrated into the current Eclipse’s OCL plug-in. Moreover, the temporal constraint support for OCL, that we define using formal scenario-based semantics, connects to automatic test generators and forms the first step towards creating a bridge linking model driven engineering and usual formal methods