An Ontological Behavioral Modeling Approach With SHACL, SPARQL, and RDF Applied to Smart Grids

Every engineering process, especially software, involves two complementary aspects: structural and behavioral. Behavior is, in essence, transforming the structure associated with the system. As a language for the object-oriented paradigm, Unified Modeling Language (UML) offers constructs for both aspects, for example, class diagrams for the structural aspect and activity diagrams for the behavioral aspect. However, without obtaining directly executable models, in glass-box terms, or reasoning support, on the other hand, when software engineering is approached with ontologies, only constructs for structural aspects are provided to develop a directly executable model, thanks to their reasoning capability. However, there are no constructs or approaches for this paradigm’s specification or definition of behavior. This lack appears mainly in the early stages of the software engineering process, where there are no constructs similar to, e.g., the activity diagram in the object-oriented domain. Object Management Group (OMG) already addressed the transformation between the two paradigms in structural terms throughout Ontology Definition Metamodel (ODM) from UML to Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL). However, there is no transformation of the object-oriented behavioral constructs into ontologies because they are not defined in the ontological paradigm. This paper addresses the definition of behavior in the ontology paradigm and the transformation of behavioral constructs between the two paradigms. The foundation of behavior specification is the flow concept, and the basis of this is the transformation of the structural model in an evaluative sense. Therefore, once the behavior has been defined in the ontology domain, the artifacts obtained throughout the life cycle are directly executable, and their validation and testing are automatic. With this approach, the life cycle is reduced to a modeling process. Thus, the resulting software engineering process improves features such as agility, simplicity, productivity, and formalism. The target audience for this work is the software engineering community, especially in the Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) paradigm approached from object-oriented and ontology perspectives. The evaluation of the proposed approach has been performed in the electric utilities, solving the problem of the validation flow for the interoperability process specified by the Common Grid Model Exchange Standard (CGMES) standard.