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Modelling languages are important in the process of software development. The suitability of a modelling language for a project depends on its applicability to the target domain. Here, domain-specific languages have an advantage over more general modelling languages. On the other hand, modelling languages like the Unified Modeling Language can be used in a wide range of domains, which supports the reuse of development knowledge between projects. This thesis treats the syntactical and semantical harmonisation of modelling languages and their combined use, and the handling of complexity of modelling languages by providing language subsets - called language profiles - with tailor-made formal semantics definitions, generated by a profile tool. We focus on the widely-used modelling languages SDL and UML, and formal semantics definitions specified using Abstract State Machines.
With the UML 2.0 standard, the Unified Modeling Language took a big step towards SDL, incorporating many features of the language. SDL is a mature and complete language with formal semantics. The Z.109 standard defines a UML Profile for SDL, mapping UML constructs to corresponding counterparts in SDL, giving them a precise semantics. In this report, we present a case study for the formalisation of the Z.109 standard. The formal definition makes the mapping precise and can be used to derive tool support.
Over a period of 30 years, ITU-T’s Specification and Description Language (SDL) has matured to a sophisticated formal modelling language for distributed systems and communication protocols. The language definition of SDL-2000, the latest version of SDL, is complex and difficult to maintain. Full tool support for SDL is costly to implement. Therefore, only subsets of SDL are currently supported by tools. These SDL subsets - called SDL profiles - already cover a wide range of systems, and are often suffcient in practice. In this report, we present our approach for extracting the formal semantics for SDL profiles from the complete SDL semantics. We then formalise the approach, present our SDL-profile tool, and report on our experiences.
UML and SDL are languages for the development of software systems that have different origins, and have evolved separately for many years. Recently, it can be observed that OMG and ITU, the standardisation bodies responsible for UML and SDL, respectively, are making efforts to harmonise these languages. So far, harmonisation takes place mainly on a conceptual level, by extending and aligning the set of language concepts. In this paper, we argue that harmonisation of languages can be approached both from a syntactic and semantic perspective. We show how a common syntactical basis can be derived from the analysis of the UML meta-model
and the SDL abstract grammar. For this purpose, conceptually sound and well-founded mappings from meta-models to abstract grammars and vice versa are defined and applied. On the semantic level, a comparison between corresponding language constructs is performed.