| International organizations such as the Object Management Group (OMG), the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) define standard specifications against which future products will be developed and ultimately verified. Such is the case of the Specification for PIM and PSM for Software Radio Components (SRC) being developed by the OMG's Software-Based Communication (SBC) Domain Task Force.; The OMG's Model Driven Architecture (MDA) provides a framework for model driven development. The notion of platform independence (i.e., PIM vs. PSM) and the notion of level of abstraction (i.e., specification vs. design) constitute two distinct facets of software modeling. The former is concerned with the dependency that a model has on specific technology platforms (e.g., CORBA, NET, etc.), while the latter is concerned with the level of details and the completeness a model offers. Both specification and design models can be considered PIMs or PSMs, depending on the inclusion or exclusion of platform specific details such as middleware technology (CORBA, J2EE, .NET). Whereas current MDA research mainly focuses on the transition between PIMs and PSMs, we are interested in the more general problem of compliance between specification and design models. A solution to this problem requires considering two aspects of product development, namely: (1) realization of a standard specification model into a design model, and (2) verification of the compliance of a design model 'against' a standard specification model. It is this latter issue that we address in this thesis, developing a case study using the SRC specification.; In essence, our proposal splits compliance between a specification and a design into two separate steps. First, the original specification is to be transformed into a semantically equivalent model (we call it tSpec for transformed specification) expressed in the language used to define the design. This transformation specifically addresses the semantic gap between the specification metamodel and the design metamodel. Second, a design model is to be obtained and its compliance to the tSpec verified. We are interested in structural and behavioral compliance. For each activity considered in our proposal, we discuss its automation and its consequences for compliance. |
