A Framework for Establishing Formal Conformance between Object Models and Object-Oriented Programs

Conformance between structural models and their implementations are usually simplified in practice, restraining reasoning to simple mappings between modeling and implementation constructs. This is not appropriate to accommodate the usual freedom of implementation for abstract concepts. A more flexible conformance notion must be addressed by conformance checking tools and model-driven development. In this paper, we propose a formal framework for defining conformance relationships between structural object models and object-oriented programs. In our framework, a syntactic mapping between model and program elements must be provided, yielding a coupling relation, used in framework instantiations for specific conformance relationships. Additionally, as in practice some intermediate program states are not relevant to conformance, we include the notion of heaps of interest, encompassing the filtered stable states for a less strict conformance checking. The framework is applied for establishing a conformance relationship in a technique of model-driven refactoring of programs.