Towards a Methodology for Verifying Partial Model Refinements

Models are good at expressing information that is known but do not typically have support for representing what information a modeler does not know or does not care about at a particular stage in the software development process. Partial models address this by being able to precisely represent uncertainty about model content. In previous work, we have defined a general approach for defining partial model semantics using a first order logic encoding. In this paper, we use this FO encoding to formally define the conditions for partial model refinement in the manner of the refinement of algebraic specifications. We use this approach to verify both manual refinements and automated transformation-based refinements. We illustrate our approach using example models and transformations.