IDF: A framework for the incremental development and conformance verification of UML active primitive components.

•We give an efficient support to design and verify UML state machine models.•We propose an Incremental Development Framework providing formal model evaluations.•Compliant models are built step-by-step, by preserving liveness properties.•We select relevant conformance relations for extension, refinement and increment.•We provide a tool to support the incremental development of models.