Authors:
Alexander Wichmann
;
Ralph Maschotta
;
Francesco Bedini
;
Sven Jäger
and
Armin Zimmermann
Affiliation:
Technische Universität Ilmenau, Germany
Keyword(s):
System Modeling, Architecture Variant Description, UML Profile, Design Space.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Applications and Software Development
;
Languages, Tools and Architectures
;
Methodologies, Processes and Platforms
;
Model Execution and Simulation
;
Model-Driven Architecture
;
Model-Driven Software Development
;
Models
;
Paradigm Trends
;
Software Engineering
;
Systems Engineering
Abstract:
The optimization of complex systems as well as other design methods require a description of the system
parameters, or the design space. Explicit encoding of all possible variants is practically impossible, thus an
implicit method is needed. While this is easy for purely numerical parameters and a fixed number of them as
usually assumed in direct or indirect optimization, it is quite hard for systems in which the architecture and thus
the structure of the parameters themselves can be varied. This paper introduces an approach to specify system
architecture variants in a concise way and proposes a UML profile for this task. Standard UML meta model
elements are used for the description of variant-specific stereotypes. An example of a variant specification for
a communication network model is presented.