. An important amount of research has been devoted to conceptual model validation, that is, to check whether a conceptual model correctly and adequately describes the users' intended needs and requirements. In this paper we present a new approach to model validation. We define a set of desirable properties that a conceptual model should satisfy and we show how the accomplishment of all these properties can be checked in a uniform way by means of planning. Our approach is independent of any particular planning method and it extends the facilities of the methods developed so far. 1 Introduction This paper describes an approach for validating conceptual models of information systems. By validation we mean the process of checking whether a conceptual model correctly and adequately describes the users' intended needs and requirements [ABC82]. This is one of the most important and crucial problems in information systems engineering. Indeed, detecting possible problems during information sy...

The validation of conceptual models is an important task with the aim of checking whether the model correctly and adequately expresses the requirements informally stated by the users. Different techniques and tools have been developed to support this task. In this paper and as part of a doctoral work, we propose an animation tool for an object oriented modelling language. This tool generates executable specifications from conceptual model specifications on the same level of abstraction. In this way, the model behaviour can be observed and checked against the intended requirements. We introduce the modelling language, the functionalities of the animation system and its architecture. 1 Introduction The process of modelling information systems is becoming more and more important in systems development as the size and complexity of systems are growing. The result of this process is a conceptual model or system specification which describes the functional requirements that the desired info...

this paper, we face the general problem of active rule validation, by which we denote a phase of the development of a rule-based application in which the design of an active rule set is evaluated to verify the presence of useful properties and the absence of undesired behaviour. The novel contribution of this paper is the use of planning as a unifying framework for the validation of rules with respect to a wide variety of properties. Planning is a general-purpose technique by which an initial goal is established (e.g., the positioning of an object by a robot in a certain location in a room), and a suitable sequence of actions (called a plan) is determined, which ensures the fulfilment of the goal (e.g., a sequence of movements of the robot's arm that ends up with the object in the desired position). The actions constituting the plan are chosen among the possible actions defined in the planning mini-world. Typically, planning proceeds backwards: the prerequisites for the initial goal are identified and established as subgoals, on which planning is recursively applied. In our approach to validation, the desired rule properties are described as firstorder goals, and the actions that the planner can exploit are those available in the "active database mini-world", namely: operations and active rules. A typical validation session not only permits the designer to verify that a certain property of active rules holds (by checking that a plan exists), but also outputs the plan, which acts as an explanation tool showing one of the possible sequences of actions leading to a state in which the property is satisfied. As a first result of the application of planning to active rule validation, we have collected and formally expressed as declarative goals a set of interesting properti...

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