Maintaining Consistency between UML Models Using Description Logic

Abstract

Abstract. In current-day object-oriented software development, the soft-ware design (typically modelled as a collection of UML diagrams) is an essential aspect. As a result, future object-oriented legacy systems will encounter the non-negligible problem of design inconsistencies in its var-ious forms. Unfortunately, in its generality, detecting these design incon-sistencies is an undecidable problem. Therefore, we suggest to restrict to description logic, a decidable fragment of first-order predicate logic, to specify and detect inconsistencies between UML models. With concrete experiments in Loom and Racer, two tools that provide support for some variant of description logic, we intend to show the feasibility of this ap-proach, and to identify the potential limitations of description logics for the purpose of maintaining design consistency in evolving legacy code. 1