Implementing inheritance in operational graphical languages

Abstract

System engineering development methods and automation techniques are required to manage the complexity inherent in the design of large computer based systems and to provide an efficient means for reusing the system by means of inheritance.Growing interest is being shown in operational models, i.e. models that can be executed using a suitable support environment. Most operational models are graphical and can be considered as high-level programs which are developed using high-level modeling languages. Generally speaking, while the OO approach has reached a good maturity at the programming level (although differences in individual languages are not negligible) there is no clear consensus on how it can be extended to the design and analysis phases.These artificial discontinuities can be eliminated if a single modeling language is used which is operational. The operational approach eliminates the scope and semantic discontinuities in the development process by using a single, integrated, formal set of modeling abstractions to create a given executable model.It was to address these problems and provide advanced software architectural features, that O 3 ML was developed by us. Combining the concept of Operational, OO and Modeling we get a modeling language which we refer to as Operational Object-Oriented Modeling Language ( O 3 ML) that provides the basic vocabulary used to express both domain knowledge and prototyping ideas.