A Combined Reference Model- and View-Based Approach to System Specification

The idea of a combined reference model- and view-based specification approach has been proposed recently in the software engineering community. In this paper we present a specification technique based on graph transformations which supports such a development approach. The use of graphs and graph transformations allows to satisfy the general requirements of an intuitive understanding and the integration of static and dynamic aspects on a well-defined and sound semantical base. On this background, formal notions of view and view relation are developed and the behaviour of views is described by a loose semantics. View relations are shown to preserve the behaviour of views. Moreover, we define a construction for the automatic integration of views which assumes that the dependencies between different views are described by a reference model. The views and the reference model are kept consistent manually, which is the task of a model manager. In case of more than two views more general scenarios are developed and discussed. We are able to show that the automatic view integration is compatible with the loose semantics, i.e., the behaviour of the system model is exactly the integration of the behaviours of the views. All concepts and results are illustrated at the well-known example of a banking system.