Analysing Use Case Diagrams in a Calculus of Context-aware Ambients

Use case diagrams are an excellent tool for capturing and analyzing the functional requirements of a system under development. Context-aware use case diagrams are an extension of use case diagrams to cater for both the functional requirements and the context-awareness requirements of context-aware and pervasive systems. They provide (graphical) notations for specifying, visualizing and documenting the intended behavior of a context-aware system at an early stage of the system development life-cycle. This paper proposes an approach to analyzing context-aware use case diagrams usind a Calculus of Context-aware Ambients (CCA). An algorithm is proposed that translates a context-aware use case diagram into a CCA process. This process can then be analyzed using the CCA tools such as the simulator ccaPL which enables the execution of CCA processes and the model-checker ccaSPIN that can check automatically whether a CCA process satisfies a desired property, e.g. deadlock freedom and reachability. The proposed approach is evaluated using a real-word example of a context-aware pedestrian collision avoidance system.