Tool paper: Combining Alf and UML in modeling tools: An example with papyrus

Conference of 15th International Workshop on OCL and Textual Modeling, OCL 2015 ; Conference Date: 28 September 2015; Conference Code:118142International audienceThe Unified Modeling Language has been used largely in the software community to draw pictures for designing and documenting software written in other languages. The real executable semantics of a program are determined by the programming language, while the UML models themselves do not have a precise enough meaning to fully specify the executable functionality of the system being developed. Recently, however, there has been a great deal of work toward the standardization of precise, executable semantics for UML models - the "meaning" behind the pictures: Foundational UML (FUML) adopted by the Object Management Group in 2008, the Action Language for FUML (Alf) adopted in 2010, the recently completed Precise Semantics for UML Composite Structures (PSCS) and the Precise Semantics for UML State Machines (PSSM), now in progress. Together, these standards effectively provide a new combined graphical and textual language for precise, executable modeling. In particular, the Alf language goes beyond simply providing a textual "action language" for detailed behavioral code within graphical models, by including textual notation for FUML structural object-oriented modeling constructs (e.g., packages, classes, associations, etc.). This opens up the possibility of tooling allowing various parts of a UML model to be represented both graphically and textually (while preserving the same semantic level), with bidirectional synchronization between the two representations. This paper presents the achievement of an initial integration of UML and Alf in the context of the Papyrus tool for the specification of executable models