A Prolog Based Approach to Consistency Checking of UML Class and Sequence Diagrams

UML is an industrial standard for designing and developing object-oriented software. It provides a number of notations for modeling different system views, but it still does not have any means of meticulously checking consistency among the models. These models can contain overlapping information which may lead to inconsistencies. If these inconsistencies are not detected and resolved properly at an early stage, they may result in many errors in implementation phase. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for consistency checking of class and sequence diagrams based on Prolog language. In the proposed approach, consistency checking rules as well as UML models are represented in Prolog, then Prolog's reasoning engine is used to automatically find inconsistencies.