Refinement Inference for Sequence Diagrams

Refinement is fundamental to software development. An earlier work proposed a refinement relation between sequence diagrams based on their required behaviors. In this paper, we first generalize the refinement relation by taking into account system variable assignment and event hiding, renaming and substitution. We then give an algorithm as a system of inference rules that does not just verify refinement relationship between two sequence diagrams but also derives sufficient conditions under which such a relationship holds. The algorithm makes use of a semantics preserving transformation on sequence diagrams. The usefulness of refinement inference is demonstrated with a case study.