Temporal OCL Extensions for Specification of Real-Time Constraints

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) receives increasing attention by designers of real-time systems. Several approaches already extend the UML notation for modeling real-time applications. In this context, it is essential to be able to specify time-bounded temporal constraints as a prerequisite to validate a model for correct system behavior. But currently, UML and corresponding extensions only provide limited means to express temporal constraints over the dynamic behavior of objects. Furthermore, the Object Constraint Language (OCL) which was developed to express restrictions over (parts of) UML models currently lacks of means to specify temporal constraints. We think that an appropriate notation to specify temporal constraints about the dynamic behavior of objects should preferably base upon already existing UML concepts. We therefore propose an extension of OCL that complies to existing concepts and is suitable to express temporal stateoriented, time-bounded constraints.