Authors:
Marc-Florian Wendland
;
Ramon Barakat
and
Martin Schneider
Affiliation:
Fraunhofer FOKUS, Germany
Keyword(s):
UML Interactions, Data Flow, Object Flow, Data Sink, Data Source, UML Sequence Diagram, Message Arguments.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Applications and Software Development
;
Executable UML
;
General-Purpose Modeling Languages and Standards
;
Languages, Tools and Architectures
;
Model-Driven Software Development
;
Software Engineering
;
Syntax and Semantics of Modeling Languages
Abstract:
UML Interactions represent one of the three UML behaviors. They describe the interwork of parts of a system
based on message exchange. UML Interactions can reside on any level of abstraction and they seem
sufficiently elaborated for high-level specifications used for sketching the communication among parts of a
system. The UML Interactions metamodel, however, reveals some deficiencies for precise specifications of
data values and data flows. Even UML 2.5 still does not provide concepts for data flows in UML Interactions.
In this paper, we suggest a profile-based extension that integrates data flow concepts with UML Interactions.
The extension supports accessing (usage of) values located in data sources and assignment (definition) of
values to data sinks in the context of message exchange and invocation of Interactions. The proposed
extension improves the expressiveness of UML Interactions in a minimal invasive manner and makes it
similar to the capabilities of UML Activities
regarding the specification of data flows.
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