ABSTRACT Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a standard modeling language for constructing and documenting software artifacts. It provides a set of diagrams to model different views of the object oriented software development. However, the UML meta-data does not enforce the consistency of the models being built using UML nor provides a standard way to discover errors and faults in these models. Currently, research efforts are directed to verify the quality, correctness and completeness of UML models. Therefore, the quality of the UML models is heavily dependent on the consistency of model components and its diagrams. In this paper, we propose a new approach to solve the problem of discovering the inconsistency in UML sequence diagrams, and verify the interaction between the system objects in these diagrams. The proposed approach is based on the object state machine and state chart diagrams and is referred to as the Model Consistency Checker using Object State Machines (MCC-OSM). Experimental results on small to midsize software design projects have showed that MCC-OSM is a promising approach in discovering inconsistency, and incompleteness and verifying the interactions of the UML dynamic view.
