Software Architecture Refinement And Its Application Based On UML And Z

Software architecture(SA) has emerged as an important discipline of software engineering research community.It is concerned with the global structure as well as the high-level abstraction of the software system.Good architecture design has always been a major factor in determining the success of large-scale and complex systems. With the size and complexity of large-scale software system increasing,before we are going to describe the software architecture abstractly,one important work is how to refine layer by layer to formate specific and realizable software architecture,that is software architecture refinement. Since UML was proposed in 1995,as a kind of unified language for modeling software architecture,it provides a whole set of concepts and graphical descriptions for describing software pattern.However,UML lacks of precise formal semantics,and there is inconsistency among multi-view diagrams,it is difficult to do the inspection of inconsistency and precise analysis for the model.More over,it limits the effectiveness of UML,so it is necessary to expand in formalization. In this paper we discuss how to combine UML and Z to a new method for refinement,and explore a kind of mechanism for how to map and combine it between UML and Z,and provide some experiences and ideas for future work. Conclusions as the following may be drawn from the paper:UML and Z can be combined to a new method for refinement,not only the method could increase consistency and reliability of software system,but also it could be used in practice.