Towards Symbolic Analysis of Visual Modeling Languages

Graph transformation has recently become more and more popular as a general, rule-based visual specification paradigm to formally capture the operational semantics of modeling languages based on metamodeling techniques as demonstrated by benchmark applications focusing on the formal treatment of the Unified Modeling Language (UML). In the paper, we enable model checking-based symbolic verification for such modeling languages by providing a meta-level transformation of well-formed model instances into SAL specifications 4]. We also discuss several optimizations in the translation process that makes our approach efficient and independent of the SAL framework.