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ABSTRACT

Modal Transition Systems (MTS) have been shown to be useful to reason about system behaviour in the context of partial information and to support incremental elaboration of behaviour models. A particularly useful notion in the context of software and requirements engineering is that of merge. MTS merging can be used as the conjunction of multiple partial operational descriptions which may have been provided as MTS or even synthesised from other description languages such as goal models and scenarios. One of the current limitations of MTS merging is that a complete and correct algorithm for merging has not been developed. Hence, an engineer attempting to merge partial descriptions may be prevented to do so by overconstrained algorithms or algorithms that introduce behaviour that does not follow from the partial descriptions being merged. This paper resolves these problems for strong semantics by providing a complete characterization of MTS consistency and a correct and complete algorithm for MTS merging.

REFERENCES

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.1 Requirements/Specifications

General Terms:
Design, Theory

Keywords:
elaboration, merge, modal transition systems, partial behaviour models