Modeling and simulation with UML and Java

Summary form only given. Since its adoption in 1997, the unified modeling language (UML) has proved very popular with software engineers and has become the de facto standard as a visual modeling language for software engineers. However, this software focus of UML has discouraged many systems engineers from adopting it in earnest. Those who did adopt UML developed strategies to cope with its shortcomings. A common approach was to model additional systems engineering concepts in other modeling tools. This made it difficult to integrate the different viewpoints and achieve traceability. Fortunately, with the release of UML 2.0 and the ensuing extensions to it in SysML - the soon-to-be adopted systems modeling language - the systems engineering community has a real alternative to systems modeling that provides a more integrated approach to systems and software engineering. Since its inception in 1997, ARTiSAN has endeavored to bridge the gap between systems and software engineering modeling by adding systems engineering extensions to the UML and, as a key member of the SysML initiative, is well poised to support these emerging standards for systems and software modeling. This presentation will provide a brief overview of the major extensions proposed by SysML, and will summarize how ARTiSAN's latest release of its flagship product Studio (version 6.0) takes the lead in supporting these concepts.

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 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.

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.

This tutorial presents the modeling concepts of the standard object modeling language, the Unified Modeling Language (UML). Particular attention is paid to the use of the UML for modeling system/software requirements and designs. A system development process and an example of its application is presented. The materials will be based on the recently released UML 1.4 standard. The tutorial also presents some of the major issues and challenges facing the evolution of the UML.

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.

Efficient and high-quality design of the substation automation systems has always been a real challenge. The problem of identification and location of information in the system and the description of information processing activities is a significant design problem. Information modeling is aimed at resolving it. An efficient approach to information modeling can significantly improve substation automation system development process. In this paper we propose the usage of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) as a main modeling language for expressing substation information models. UML was specified by Rational Software Corporation in 1997. Today, UML is adopted by the Object Management Group as an object-oriented modeling language with formally defined syntax and semantics. As expected, UML could be widely accepted in various industries (software, telecommunications, medicine, electro-industry, aero-industry etc.). The modeling approach is explained on one typical small-range 35 kV/10 kV distribution substation. Modeling steps: system usage specification, system structure specification, and behavior and constraints specification are described together with explanation of usage of some UML diagrams and modeling concepts.

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.

XMI (XML Metadata Interchange) is used to exchange metadata information of UML (Unified Modeling Language) models using XML (Extensible Markup Language) representation. All major CASE tools e.g. ArgoUML, Rational Rose, Enterprise Architect, MS Visio, Altova, Smart Draw, etc can export and import XMI. However, current implementation of XMI in all CASE tools does not fulfill the goal of a model interchange as the CASE tools can just import XMI and extract metadata information but cannot generate UML models such as UML class diagrams. A primary reason of this inability is that XMI only provides the information about what elements are in a UML class model but not the information about how these elements (such as classes, associations, etc) are represented and laid out in diagrams. Without this facility, the real power of XMI is still un-explored. In this paper, we present a Binary Space Portioning (BSP) Tree data structure based novel approach to re-generate UML diagrams from XMI. A VB.NET implementation is also presented as a proof of concept.

The main purpose of this paper is to present knowledge-based Enterprise model (EM) sufficiency as data repository for Unified Modelling Language (UML) models generation. UML models are one of the most usable modelling languages in system lifecycle design stage, despite the problem domain of the system. UML models can be generated from Enterprise Model by using particular transformation algorithms presented in previous researches. Generation process from Enterprise model is represented by certain Hospital Information Management process example. Generated UML dynamic Use Case, Activity, Sequence and State models of different perspectives of Hospital Information Management process prove sufficiency of stored information in Enterprise model.

Modelling is one of the most difficult tasks of software engineering. UML (unified modelling language) is an object-oriented standard modelling language, which can express both the dynamic and static information during the processes of software analysis and design. Among the over 100 UML modelling tools, Rational Rose and Visio are the most extensively used ones. Here we comprehensively compare the performance of these two tools in software engineering teaching and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. The points presented in this review provide guidance for the selection of modelling tools and arrangement of teaching activities for software engineering.

Regardless of the large number of Object-Oriented (OO) modeling languages currently being used in the Information Systems (IS) modeling process, unavailability of an OO modeling language that can be used in both the analysis and design phases disintegrates the two phases. The problem is, such disintegration can lead to a high level of missing information in the real world system from the analysis phase to the design phase. The approach of this study is to propose a framework to produce design phase models from analysis phase models using ontology based Unified Modeling Language (UML), thereby integrating the two phases. The results obtained from the porposed framework involve: a consructed language which can be used in generating the analysis phase scripts; and the development of script files based on the UML constructs at the analysis and design phases to automatically generate the UML scripts for those two phases. Since this study is a part of an ongoing research study, it can be concluded that, at the end of this study (1) both analysis and design phases would be able to integrate using a common OO modeling language (2) the manual work involved in the current analysis and design modeling would be reduced (3) the complexities and difficulties faced by the modelers (By modelers we mean the analysts and designers who are doing the analysis and design phase modeling) in using UML modeling tools would be reduced.

Computer-aided software engineering (CASE) Tools is a set of software that results in high-quality and maintainable software products. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is one of the most commonly used CASE tools for analyzing and expressing software requirements. Considerably, UML overcomes ambiguity limitation which results from infamous shortcoming of national language. However, how to express requirements of E-Commerce System is still a very challenging problem. In this paper, requirement analysis is highlighted by IBM Rational Rose and Microsoft Visio, and typical E-Commerce system by UML is investigated as well. At the end, a guideline generated for Jewellery E-Commerce (JEC) is presented by UML use cases, activity diagrams, and data flow diagrams in details.

To solve the problem that UML (Unified Modeling Language) design model cannot be model-checked for its rough semantics, an extension of UML, called xUML4MC, is defined by extending the activity diagram with accurate syntax and semantics to model the activities of an object. Besides, the technique for automatical transformation of xUML4MC model into MSVL (Modeling, Simulation and Verification Language) model is also presented, which in turn can be verified with model checking tool MSV. The formalism arms the classical visual specification language UML with the power of model checking, and helps to promote the quality of software system.