A Strongly Consistent Transformation from UML Interactions to PEPA Nets

With the heterogeneity and complexity growth of embedded real-time systems (ERTS) is required an interdisciplinary approaches in the development processes embracing software engineering, mechanics, electric and electronics areas. Accordingly, a modeling language, called Unified Modeling Language (UML), has been specified by OMG (Object Management Group). However, when dealing with ERTS is indispensable the description of quantitative system aspects such as time and energy consumption. For that, a new UML Profile for Modeling and Analysis of Real-Time and Embedded systems (MARTE) has been also specified by OMG. Nevertheless, these UML models themselves are not directly analyzable. This paper presents the mapping process of interaction overview diagram (IO) into a time Petri net with energy constraints (ETPN) so as to analyze and verify the functional, timing and energy requirements in early phases of the life-cycle development.

The visual modeling language UML embodies object-oriented design principles.It provides a standard way to visualize the design of a system. It exploits a richset of well-defined graphical notations for creating abstract models. However,the power of UML is lessened through partially specified formal semantics. Indeed, UML notations are semi-formal and do not lead to fully formalized andexecutable semantics. Fortunately, UML diagrams are prone to early formalization. Formal methods are a valuable tool that can help overcome the UMLconstructs’ shortage of firm semantics. It is a powerful way to ascribe precise semantics to the graphical notations used in UML diagrams and models.Our work aims to support the semantics of the UML Interaction Overview Diagram. It introduces an approach to leveraging the strengths of the MaudeRewriting Logic language as a formal specification language. The proposal relies on a model-driven engineering approach. It aims to automate the UMLInteraction Overview Diagram’s mapping to a Maude language specification.The Maude language and its linked tools, including the Maude Model Checker,are used to analyze and verify the resulting Maude specification. Finally, anapplication example shows the feasibility and benefits of the proposed approach.

Unified Modeling Language (UML) plays an important role in the modern software development process by offering standardized methods for visual modeling, analysis, and design of complex systems. This paper discusses the main aspects of storing, editing, and integrating UML documents with integrated development environments (IDEs). The main focus is on comparing the two main formats for storing UML models – XML Metadata Interchange (XMI) and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). XMI, being an official standard developed by Object Management Group, provides a high degree of detail and compatibility with various UML tools, making it preferable for large and complex projects that require support for the full UML specification. At the same time, JSON is simple and flexible, which makes it suitable for projects where speed of development and ease of integration are important, although it is inferior to XMI in describing complex aspects of UML models. The paper analyzes in detail the methods of editing UML documents, including manual editing and automated approaches, using APIs and scripts. Manual editing is useful when you need to make small changes to the structure of a UML document, but it can be time-consuming and error-prone when working with large projects. Automation, on the other hand, provides effective tools for mass editing and generating UML elements, which significantly speeds up development and minimizes the likelihood of errors, especially since modern tools such as StarUML offer the necessary tools for programmatically modifying UML documents by integrating them into development processes. Combining of UML documents with integrated development environments also plays a key role in increasing development efficiency, as this allows automating code generation based on UML models, maintaining synchronization between code and diagrams, and facilitating visualization and documentation of architectural solutions. Despite the significant advantages, there are challenges associated with limited support for all UML features and potential conflicts between models and code. This only emphasizes the need for further research in this area. Prospects for further research include the development of new methods and tools for working with UML documents, improving their integration with development environments, and using artificial intelligence to automate the analysis and design of UML models. Attention should also be paid to the using of UML with continuous integration processes, which can significantly increase the flexibility and adaptability of software development. Thus, the study of the structure of storing, editing, and integrating UML documents is an important area for optimizing the design and development of modern software systems.

The Unified Modelling Language (UML) is a language for specifying, visualising, constructing and documenting software systems. The UML proved to be extremely successful and it has achieved tremendous popularity making it the de facto industry standard for object oriented system development. As such, many researchers presented empirical studies on the practical usage of UML but as well criticisms for UML complexity, difficulty to be learnt, etc. Even though a large number of articles and books are devoted to various aspects of UML language, there is little evidence on how UML is used. This study attempts to identify the profile of persons using UML, to pinpoint UML diagrams that are being used and their effectiveness, to discover whether CASE tools are being used and to record the perceived usefulness of UML language. For conducting the study a survey was developed and it was distributed to mailing lists of Greek IT professionals and to university students. The findings indicate that UML is used successfully in the majority of software development projects and that most users perceive UML positively since it supports faster system building, development of higher quality software systems, and for specific cases, it leads to software development cost‐decrease.

To ease the development of distributed systems, the visual notions for the structural aspects of object-oriented analysis and design should be combined with techniques for handling concurrency and distribution. A novel approach and language for the visual design of distributed software systems is introduced and illustrated by means of an example. The language of OCoNs (Object Coordination Nets) is integrated into the structuring mechanisms of the UML (Unified Modeling Language) standard for object-oriented analysis and design. Such an object-oriented notation is crucial for handling complex software systems and can be extended with the graphical expressive power of Petri nets to also describe concurrency and coordination. The same visual language is used to specify the interfaces and contracts of software components, the resource handling within a component as well as the control flow of services.

Unified Modeling Language (UML) has emerged as the software industry’s dominant modeling language. It is the de facto modeling language standard for specifying, visualizing, constructing, and documenting the components of software systems. Despite its prominence and status as the standard modeling language, UML has its critics. Opponents argue that it is complex and difficult to learn. Some question the rationale of having nine diagramming techniques in UML and the raison d’être of those nine techniques in UML. Others point out that UML lacks a comprehensive methodology to guide its users, which makes the language even more convoluted. A few studies on UML can be found in the literature. However, no study exists to provide a quantitative measure of UML complexity or to compare UML with other object-oriented techniques. In this research, we evaluate the complexity of UML using complexity metrics. The objective is to provide a reliable and accurate quantitative measure of UML complexity. A comparison of the complexity metrical values of UML with other object-oriented techniques was also carried out. Our findings suggest that each diagram in UML is not distinctly more complex than techniques in other modeling methods. But as a whole, UML is very complex–2-11 times more complex than other modeling methods.

Unified Modeling Language (UML) has emerged as the software industry’s dominant modeling language. It is the de facto modeling language standard for specifying, visualizing, constructing, and documenting the components of software systems. Despite its prominence and status as the standard modeling language, UML has its critics. Opponents argue that it is complex and difficult to learn. Some question the rationale of having nine diagramming techniques in UML and the raison d’être of those nine techniques in UML. Others point out that UML lacks a comprehensive methodology to guide its users, which makes the language even more convoluted. A few studies on UML can be found in the literature. However, no study exists to provide a quantitative measure of UML complexity or to compare UML with other object-oriented techniques. In this research, we evaluate the complexity of UML using complexity metrics. The objective is to provide a reliable and accurate quantitative measure of UML complexity. A comparison of the complexity metrical values of UML with other object-oriented techniques was also carried out. Our findings suggest that each diagram in UML is not distinctly more complex than techniques in other modeling methods. But as a whole, UML is very complex–2-11 times more complex than other modeling methods.

Informal and graphical modeling techniques enable developers to construct abstract representations of systems. Object-oriented modeling techniques further facilitate the development process. The Unified Modeling Language (UML), an object-oriented modeling approach, could be broad enough in scope to represent a variety of domains and gain widespread use. Currently, UML comprises several different notations with no formal semantics attached to the individual diagrams. Therefore, it is not possible to apply rigorous automated analysis or to execute a UML model in order to test its behavior, short of writing code and performing exhaustive testing. We introduce a general framework for formalizing a subset of UML diagrams in terms of different formal languages based on a homomorphic mapping between metamodels describing UML and the formal language. This framework enables the construction of a consistent set of rules for transforming UML models into specifications in the formal language. The resulting specifications derived from UML diagrams enable either execution through simulation or analysis through model checking, using existing tools. This paper describes the use of this framework for formalizing UML to model and analyze embedded systems. A prototype system for generating the formal specifications and results from an industrial case study are also described.

As a powerful and object-oriented graphical modeling language, Unified Modeling Language (UML) has been introduced into the design and development of safety-critical computer systems. However, UML model is difficult to reflect the concurrency and consistency of constraint rules between objects and impossible to completely demonstrate the dynamic behavior characteristics of a system. Further, it cannot be directly expressed and analyzed by mathematical tools. Petri net modeling technology uses graphical element place and transition to clearly describe the internal interactions of a system. Meanwhile, Petri net has mature mathematical analysis methods. We have proposed to combine these two tools for designing and analyzing a system with a set of transformation rules from UML statecharts to Petri net. In this paper, an automatic conversion tool is introduced. The tool performs the transformation with three steps as follows: (1) Transforming UML model into XML document, which makes information extraction of the UML model become easier. (2) Analyzing semantics of UML model and Petri net model, then designing data structure for transformation, and completing the transformation based on the transformation rules. (3) Analyzing the transformed Petri net model to verify the characteristics of the UML model. The transformation rules and the tools are developed based on a new railway interlocking system.

The UML (Unified Modeling Language), with the enhancements in UML 2.0, is receiving interest by an increasing number of industrial and academic groups from the EDA, embedded software and hardware systems, who look at it and at its extension mechanisms as a practical and standard means to define family of languages targeted to specific application domains and levels of abstraction, while providing unification. In the Embedded Systems and SoC (System-on-Chip) area, we defined a model-driven design methodology based on UML 2.0, UML profiles and C/C++/SystemC. In this paper, we extend this design flow in order to support the platform-based design principles. We also present the architecture of a prototype tool, which provides a graphical representation in UML (from a highlevel functional model down to RTL) of hardware and software components, C/C++/SystemC code generation from UML models, and a reverse engineering process from C/C++/SystemC code to UML models.

To most in the software community, "modeling" is drawing pictures, something much different than "coding". While programming languages must be specified precisely enough to be executable, this has not necessarily been the case for modeling languages. Indeed, the well-known Unified Modeling Language (UML) has for years had a specification that is far from precise. However, precise models are quite common in other engineering disciplines, and there has been a minority even in software engineering that have created models that are precise enough to be, themselves, executable. Over the last decade, the UML community has more generally come to realize the benefits of having at least a subset of UML specified with precise execution semantics. While not all models need to be executable, executable models can support early testing and analysis of the design of critical software systems, as well as supporting simulation for communities using UML for modeling beyond just software (such as SysML for systems engineering). As a result, there has been a great deal of work in recent years toward the standardization of precise, executable semantics for UML models - the "meaning" behind the pictures: Foundational UML (fUML), the Action Language for fUML (Alf) and the recently completed Precise Semantics for UML Composite Structures. These new specifications provide the promise of widespread support for executable modeling across the many UML tools now on the market.

Software product line (SPL) is a software engineering paradigm for software development. A software product within a product line often has specific functionalities that are not common to all other products within the product line. Those specific functionalities are termed “variant features” in a product line. SPL paradigm involves the modeling of variant features. However, little work in SPL investigates and addresses the modeling of variant features specific to user interface (UI). Unified Modeling Language (UML) is the de facto modeling language for object-oriented software systems. It is known that UML needs better support in modeling UIs. Thus, much research developed UML extensions to improve UML support in modeling UIs. Yet little of this work is related to developing such extensions for modeling UIs for SPLs in which variant features specific to UI modeling must be addressed. This research develops a UML extension -Web User Interface Modeling Language (WUIML) to address these problems. WUIML defines elements for modeling variant features specific to user interfaces for Web-based SPLs. The model elements in WUIML extend from the metaclass and BasicActivity of the UML2.0 metamodel. WUIML integrates the modeling of variant features specific to user interfaces to UML. For example, in a Web-based patient registration software product line, member products targeting British users may use British date format in the user interface, while member products targeting United States users may use United States date format in the user interface. Thus, this is a variant feature for this product line. WUIML defines a model element, XOR, to represent such exclusive or conditions in a product line user interface model. WUIML would reduce SPL engineers’ efforts needed in UI development. To validate the WUIML research outcome, a case study was conducted. The results of this empirical study indicate that modeling UIs for Web-based SPLs using WUIML is more effective and efficient than using standard UML.

The interactive diagrams (ID) in the unified modeling language (UML) is consisted of object and the relation between objects, depicts the interaction relation and includes the information transferred between objects. As two interactive diagrams, the semantics of sequence diagrams (SD) and collaboration diagrams (CD) are equivalence in the unified modeling language, both diagrams can be converted with each other without the lost of information. But it is necessary that both diagrams coexist in the unified modeling language because their emphases are different in the course of interaction. Such study is instructive for practitioners to select both diagrams in real tasks.

The two most critical phases of SDLC are the specification and the designing phase as they involve the transformation of the semantics from real world domain to computer software systems. Unified Modelling Language (UML) has been accepted as blue print for design and specification of software critical systems. But, UML structures have the weakness in preciously defining the semantics of a system. Any misinterpretation in safety critical system’s specification may risks loss of lives. Formal methods are mathematical tools and techniques which are proven very adequate, principally, at requirement specification and design level. However, formal methods are not welcomed because of rigorous use of mathematics. Therefore, a bridge is required between UML and formal methods to overcome the above insufficiencies. The endeavour of this paper is to propose a new approach by integrating UML and Z notation, a formal specification language. The main focus of this paper is on transforming the UML diagram: use case diagram, class diagram and sequence diagram to Z Schema for capturing both the syntax and semantics, particularly for safety critical system. The resultant formal model of the approach are analyzed and verified by using Z/Eves tool.

To solve the identification and comprehension problem of crosscutting concerns in existing legacy software system, a framework of aspects-oriented software reverse engineering was proposed. An approach on re-modularizing traversal features of legacy system was presented, which based on various Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams. While modeling crosscutting concerns in UML use case diagrams, the non-functional requirements that affect several use case modules can be enveloped into aspects modules with stereotype mechanism. The recurring message transmission patterns can be re-modularized as aspects in UML sequence diagrams with UML collaborations. Standard UML activity diagram notations were extended and modified by nodes fusion and addition, which support the graphical composition operation between crosscutting behaviors and primary business rules of concurrent system. The case study indicates traversal features of software system can be extracted and re-modularized from various perspectives in aspects-oriented reverse engineering, which improves the comprehensibility and maintainability of legacy system.