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FORMALIZATION OF TEXTUAL USE CASES BASED ON PETRI NETS

STÉPHANE S. SOMÉ

School of Information Technology and Engineering, University of Ottawa, 800 King Edward, P.O. Box 450, Stn. A Ottawa, Ontario, K1N 6N5, Canada

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https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218194010004931Cited by:12 (Source: Crossref)

Abstract

A use case is a specification of interactions involving a system and external actors of that system. The intuitive, user centered nature of textual use cases is one of the reasons for the success of the use case approach. A certain level of formalization is however needed to automate use case based system development, including tasks such as design synthesis, verification and validation. In this paper, a mapping from textual use cases to a formal model (Petri nets) is proposed. Use cases are described in a restricted-form of natural language. The abstract syntax of the language is formally defined using a tuple structure. The mapping from use cases to Petri nets considers use cases sequencing constraints defined at the syntactic-level, and provides a definition of execution semantics to use cases.

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