Schedule
Type | Day | Time | Place | Start | Lecturer |
V3 | Mo | 15:00-16:30 | 5052 | October 19 | |
Tu | 08:15-09:45 | AH IV | October 20 | ||
Ü2 | Wed | 17:30-19:00 | 6019 | October 28 |
Notice: The lecture on Jan. 26 will take place at 10:00 - 11:30 in Room 5056.
News
10.11.2009
(Important!) | Students that want to participate in the exam need to register via the CAMPUS system. Firm deadline for registration: November 30. Bachelor students should directly contact the lecturer for exam registration. | |
04.11.2009 | There will be *no* exercise class on 11.11. Ex.3a and 3b will be available today and on 11.11, respectively. The solutions for both will be explained on 18.11. | |
26.10.2009 | A new version of the lecture 2 slides are available, where partial order is redefined to be reflexive. | |
19.10.2009 | Lecture on Tuesday (20.10.2009 - at 8:15) will be held in the room 2002 located near the main entrance of the Informatik building. It is the new seminar room of the chair I11. |
Content and motivation
The Unified Modelling Language (UML) --- more generally, model-driven engineering --- plays an important role in modern software design. The UML basically consists of a set of different notations, each notation focused on a specific aspect of the software system at hand. The aim of this course is to consider some major fragments of the UML: sequence diagrams, hierachical state machines (also known as Statecharts), and the OCL (short for Object Constraint Language).
| |
 |
- Sequence diagrams specify the interaction patterns between the system components and are a popular elicitation technique for requirements engineering.
| |
 |
- Hierachical state machines and message passing automata are used to describe the behaviour of system components, and are intensively used during the system's design phases, e.g., in the fields of avionics and automotive industry.
- Finally, the OCL allows to specify properties of system components, ranging from pre- and postconditions to invariants and more complex properties.
Aims of this course
The aim of this course is to treat the theoretical underpinnings of the aforementioned UML fragments. In particular, we will present the theories required to:
- Clarify and make precise the semantics of the (treated fragments of the) UML;
- Reason about the basic properties of UML models;
- Algorithms to allow for the verification of such properties on UML models
It is our firm belief (and experience) that a solid theoretical underpinning is of prime importance to obtain automated tools (such as MSCan) that produce reliable, i.e, verifiable results.
Prerequisites
Although the name UML might suggest differently, this is a theoretical course! That is, a solid basis in algorithms and data structures, automata theory, and a bit of theoretical complexity theory is needed to be able to follow this course.
The course will cover for instance, formal semantics (how to precisly lay down the meaning of UML diagrams) and formal verification (is checking certain properties on UML diagrams decidable, and if so, efficiently decidable).
The course will cover for instance, formal semantics (how to precisly lay down the meaning of UML diagrams) and formal verification (is checking certain properties on UML diagrams decidable, and if so, efficiently decidable).
Basic knowledge of the undergraduate courses of the first two years (Vordiplom):
- Automata Theory
- Mathematical Logic
- Discrete Mathematics
- Complexity Theory
Further information
The course will be entirely given in English. The slides and other course material will also be in English. There are no lecture notes (yet); the course material will consist of slides. An examination will take place at the end of the course.
Slides and exercise sheets
Date | Lecture | Subject | Slides | |
Oct 19 | 1 | Introduction |  | |
Oct 20 | 2 | Sequence diagrams | (updated*) | |
Oct 26 | 3 | Message sequence graphs | | |
Oct 27 | 4 | Properties of message sequence graphs | | |
Nov 2 | 5 | Compositional message sequence graphs | | |
Nov 9 | 6 | Communicating finite-state machines | (updated^2) | |
Nov 16 | 7 | Languages and subclasses of CFMs | (updated) | |
Nov 17 | 8 | Realisability | | |
Nov 23 | 9 | |||
Nov 24 | 10 | |||
Nov 30 | 11 | |||
Dec 7 | 12 | |||
Dec 14 | 13 | |||
Dec 15 | 14 | |||
Jan 11 | 15 | |||
Jan 12 | 16 | |||
Jan 18 | 17 | |||
Jan 25 | 18 | |||
Jan 26 | 19 |
(*): The slides have been updated. Please find the details in "News".
Exercise | Exercise Sheet | Solutions | Due |
1 | | | Oct. 28 |
2 | | | Nov. 4 |
3a | | Nov. 18 | |
3b | | | Nov. 18 |
4 | | Nov. 25 | |
5 | Dec. 2 | ||
6 | Dec. 9 | ||
7 | Dec. 16 | ||
8 | Jan. 13 | ||
9 | Jan. 20 | ||
10 | Jan. 27 |
Additional background literature
Jos Warmer and Anneke Kleppe, Object Constraint Language, The: Precise Modeling with UML. Addison Wesley, 2001.
D. Harel and M. Politi, Modeling Reactive Systems with Statecharts: The STATEMATE Approach, McGraw-Hill, 1998.
(The course will however be mainly based on recent scientific papers.)
