Incremental scenario modeling using hierarchical object-oriented Petri Net

Abstract

Scenario-based modeling is emerging as a key technology in software development because scenarios are easy to describe and understand, naturally describing the real world, and highly used in several development phases. Scenario-Based Software Modeling (SBSM) represents scenarios with a formal method, and then integrates each scenario into a global one excluding redundant, incomplete, and inconsistent elements. An issue which is not yet proposed a clear solution in SBSM is the handling of different abstraction levels. In the existing proposals, this problem is hidden with an implicit assumption that all such scenarios have the same abstraction levels, which we believe to be unrealistic. In our research, we propose a Hierarchical Object-Oriented Petri Net (HOONet) as a method to specify the scenarios, and also suggest a method to integrate scenarios including different abstraction levels as well as redundancy, incompleteness, and inconsistency. Coordinating abstraction levels of scenarios can be achieved by considering scenario models as state-based transition models and verifying the transition models with respect to behavioral equivalence. In order to show the effectiveness of our suggestion, overall processes of SBSM using HOONet are explained with a practical example.