Support Formal Component-Based Development with UML Profile

Integrating formal methods into UML opens up a way to complement UML-based software development with precise semantics, development methodologies, as well as rigorous verification and refinement techniques. In this paper, we present an approach to integrate a formal method to practical component-based model driven development through defining a UML profile that maps the concepts of the formal method as UML stereotypes, and implementing the profile into a CASE tool. Unlike most of the previous works in this vein, which concentrate on verifying the correctness of the models built in the development process, we focus on how the full development process can be driven by applying the refinement rules of the formal method in an incremental and interactive manner. The formal method we adopt in this work is the refinement for Component and Object Systems (rCOS). We demonstrate the development activities in the CASE tool using an example.