ADVANCE D3.2 General Platform Maintenance

Core Rodin platform

Overview

The Rodin platform versions concerned by this deliverable are:

• 2.4 (released on 31.01.2012),
• 2.5 (released on 02.05.2012),
• 2.6 (released on 31.07.2012).

The core Rodin platorm maintenance task focused on fixing the identified bugs and rectifying usability issues. During DEPLOY, many features and contributions were added to the toolset as users wishes and requests were collected along. At the same time, the Event-B models and proof got bigger and bigger, according to the constantly growing experience of the users involved and the size of the systems they modelled. Scalability issues occured when feature addition was favoured to design refactorings. Thus, as the DEPLOY project was nearing its end, it appeared mandatory for the people involved in tooling, to address some specific bugs and issues related to scalability and usability reported by the DEPLOY partners, and wished resolved by the end of the project. The various tasks to be performed were scheduled, prioritized and regularly updated during bi-weekly teleconferences.

The following paragraphs will give an overview of the the work that has been performed concerning maintenance on the existing platform components (i.e. core platform and plug-ins). Release Notes and the SourceForge trackers (bugs and feature requests) are available for more details about the previous and upcoming releases of the Rodin platform.

Motivations / Decisions

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Available Documentation

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Planning

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UML-B Improvements (Colin Snook, Vitaly Savicks)

Overview

The UML-B plug-in and associated frameworks are developed and maintained by Dr Colin Snook at the University of Southampton. Significant contributions (to the latest version) have been made by Vitaly Savicks (State-machines) and Gintautas Sulskus (Class Diagrams). The UML-B plugin provides UML-like diagrammatic modelling as an extension to Event-B and the Rodin platform. UML-B is an established plug-in which will be developed and improved to support the aims of the Advance project. UML-B was redeveloped during the Deploy project to provide closer integration with Event-B. A state-machine diagram editor is already released in this integrated version and a class diagram editor is now being developed as a prototype. Other improvements will include new diagrammatic notations which are directly related to the aims of Advance, such as component diagrams, as well as more general improvements, such as usability, and any features required by the projects industrial partners.

Motivations / Decisions

The implementation of the UML-B tool is structured to provide re-usable features as much as possible. To achieve this, wherever possible, generic frameworks are developed and the implementation of specific diagram tools is minimised by utilising these frameworks. The following frameworks are now in use by UML-B and available as a basis for future diagrammatic modelling notations.

• The Event-B EMF framework provides an EMF basis for Event-B models (developed during the Deploy project).
  • Provides an EMF representation of Event-B models with persistance into the Rodin database.
• The Event-B EMF Support for Modelling Extensions framework provides support for extending Event-B with new modelling features (initially developed during the Deploy project and now being extended in the Advance project).
  • Provides Navigator support for EMF-only model elements
  • Provides a persistence mechanism for model extensions that are not needed to be processed by Rodin.
  • A Generic Refiner for modelling extensions has recently been added.
• The Event-B GMF Diagrams Generic Support framework provides support for developing new diagram notations (started in the Deploy project but mostly developed during the Advance project).
  • Provides Generic support for diagrammatic aspects of modelling extensions
  • A generic Validation and Event-B generation service has recently been added

A new release of the State-machine diagram editor has been made. This release corrected some problems and improved use of the generic framework features.

Work is in progress on a new version of the UML-B Class Diagram editor. This takes the same approach as the State-machines editor in that the models are contained within Machines (and, in this case, also Contexts) and that diagrammatic model features link to and enhance existing Event-B elements rather than generate everything. The Class diagram editor is currently a prototype and has not been released.

Available Documentation

[reference Fontainebleau Rodin workshop paper on Generic frameworks]

Wiki pages for developers using the Generic extensions and Diagrams frameworks.

http://wiki.event-b.org/index.php/EMF_framework_for_Event-B

http://wiki.event-b.org/index.php/Generic_Event-B_EMF_extensions (Under Construction)

[reference Dusseldorf Rodin workshop paper on Event-B Statemachines]

Wiki pages for users of UML-B

http://wiki.event-b.org/index.php/UML-B

Planning

The following work is planned:

• Re-base the Event-B EMF framework on the EMF model of the Rodin database (which is now available as a result of the development of a new Rodin editor to replace the form based editor).
• Re-write the Event-B generator of the State-machine diagram editor so that it uses the generic generator from the Event-B GMF Support for Generic Diagrams framework. This will improve performance.
• Improve the State-machine diagram animation interface so that it supports animation of multiple diagrams.
• Complete the development of the new version of the UML-B Class Diagram editor.
• Develop Animation interface for the Class diagram editor.
• Develop a Component diagram editor and associated simulation tools.

Code generation (Andy Edmunds)

Overview

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Motivations / Decisions

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Available Documentation

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Planning

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ProR (Michael Jastram/Lukas Ladenberger)

Overview

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• A Method for Tracing Requirements into Specifications
• ProR/Rodin Integration plugin to support the method

Motivations / Decisions

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The motivation of the Rodin/ProR integration plugin was to bring two complimentary fields of research, requirements engineering and formal modelling, closer together. Especially, the traceability within a system description is a challenging problem of requirements engineering. In particular, formal models of the system are often based on informal requirements, but creating and maintaining the traceability between the two can be challenging. In , we presented an incremental approach for producing a system description from an initial set of requirements. The foundation of the approach is a classification of requirements into artefacts W (domain properties), R (requirements) and S (specification). In addition, the approach uses designated phenomena as the vocabulary employed by the artefacts. The central idea is that adequacy of the system description must be justified, meaning that W ∧ S ⇒ R. The approach establishes a traceability, and the resulting system description may consist of formal and informal artefacts. We created tool support for this approach by integrating Rodin and ProR. We designed it with the goal to support the approach described in , and to ease the integration of natural language requirements and Event-B.

Available Documentation

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• A Method and Tool for Tracing Requirements into Specifications: The paper has been submitted to Science of Computer Programming.
• Requirements Traceability between Textual Requirements and Formal Models Using ProR: The paper has been accepted for iFM'2012.

• Tutorial for the Rodin/ProR integration can be found here: .
• The User Guide containing an additional Tutorial for ProR can be found here: .

Planning

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There are still some limitations on the ProR/Rodin integration plugin, however. While all required data structures exist, the plugin would benefit from more sophisticated reporting. In particular, lists a number of properties of a correct system description. While the presence of these properties does not guarantee correctness, their absence indicates a problem. Reporting on the state of these properties would be valuable.

Furthermore, the plugin does not support classifying phenomena. In a next step we will work on a concept for classifying and maintaining phenomena with ProR.

Camille (Ingo Weigelt)

Overview

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Motivations / Decisions

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Available Documentation

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Planning

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