Semantic Quality Attributes for Big-Step Modelling Languages

A semantic quality attribute of a modelling language is a desired semantic characteristic that is common to all models specified in that language. A modeller can enjoy the luxury of not having to model the invariants of the behaviour that are implicitly enforced by the semantic quality attributes. In this paper, we introduce three semantic quality attributes for the family of big-step modelling languages (BSMLs). In a BSML, a model’s reaction to an environmental input is a sequence of small steps, each of which can consist of the execution of a set of transitions from multiple concurrent components. Each of our three semantic quality attributes specifies a desired property about how the sequence of small steps form a big step. We systematically enumerate the range of BSML semantics that satisfy each semantic quality attribute.