Towards the use of slicing techniques for an efficient invariant checking

Abstract

In Model Driven Development (MDD), invariant checking involves determining whether a model is consistent with invariants defined in a metamodel. Such checking can improve developers' understanding of modeled aspects of complex systems and uncover structural errors in design models during the early stages of software development. General-purpose rigorous analysis tools that check invariants are likely to perform the analysis over the entire metamodel and model. Their scalability thus becomes an issue (e.g., the time used for checking can be up to several hours) with very large metamodels and models (e.g., more than 500,000 elements). In this paper we introduce model slicing within the invariant checking process, and use a slicing technique to reduce the size of checking inputs to improve the scalability of existing invariant checking tools. The evaluation we performed provides evidence that model slicing can significantly reduce the time to perform the invariant checking while preserving the checking results.