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Over time, the development of technology in this digital era is growing very rapidly, so that our lives are made easier with the emergence of various kinds of applications. The problem in this research is that the company has difficulty in monitoring sales developments, the company has difficulty in developing markets to other areas, customers must come to the location to buy goods and pay cash. The purpose of this research is to design a web-based sales application for MSMEs. The method used in conducting the analysis is using SWOT while at the design stage using the waterfall method with UML tools. Applications designed to help MSMEs optimize their product sales activities, as well as make it easier for customers to place orders and payments and also increase and expand their business. The result of this research is that this UMKM e-commerce web application can help in monitoring orders, payments, and orders delivery.

For the application of concepts that support facilities and places to support the learning process in which related to measurement, testing, understanding development, skills development, and innovation in the field of science in computer laboratories and laboratory assistants at the Atma Luhur ISB that meet the demands of the workforce in the field. In the process of screening a new laboratory assistant is one of the steps in the laboratory so that prospective assistants are selected according to specified criteria. But unfortunately, the lack of information efficiency towards the acceptance of new laboratory assistants for active students requires a new mobile-based Assistant Admissions System where prospective assistants can carry out the entire registration process quickly. This application was created using the waterfall model and object-oriented methods with UML Tools. Registration application for laboratory assistants makes it easy to access registration for students and is made to apply the Fisher Yattes algorithm in the process of randomizing questions in the online test process, The Advantages of Fisher-Yates Algorithm is the effectiveness of the randomization method and the optimal complexity of the algorithm, O (n). Then it can be concluded that the planning of the acceptance system for android-based computer laboratory assistant candidates can maximize activities in serving prospective laboratory assistants to register and enter the online selection test.

Unified Modelling Language (UML) is essentially a de-facto standard for software modeling and supported with many modeling tools. In this study, 58 UML tools have been analysed for modelling viewpoints, analysis, transformation & export, collaboration, tool integration, scripting, project management, and knowledge management. The analysis results reveal important findings: (i) 11 UML tools support multiple viewpoints, (ii) 17 tools support large-viewpoint management, (iii) Umple and Reactive Blocks support formal verification, (iv) 9 tools support the simulation of activity diagrams, (v) while 14 tools check pre-defined well-formedness rules, 8 of them support user-defined rules, (vi) 16 tools support scripting, (vii) 29 tools support code-generation and 18 of them support round-trip engineering, (viii) Java is the top popular language, (ix) 38 tools export UML models as image, 32 tools export as HTML, and 32 tools export as XML/XMI, (x) 17 tools enable versioning and 13 of them support multi-user access, (xi) 15 tools support the plug-in extensions and 12 tools support the IDE integration, (xii) 6 tools support project management, and (xiii) while most tools provide user-manuals, interactive guidance is rarely supported. The results will be helpful for practitioners in choosing the right tool(s) and the tool developers in determining the weaknesses/strengths.

In the present consequence, whole world depends on software. It is a cost effective way is essential because all countries depend on complex computer based systems. So it is a big challenge of the developers and researchers to adopt latest technologies which convert a highly complex system design into a simple design. Intended for this purpose, developers inspire the design and construction of computer-based systems by using reusable software which is called as component. A component can be deployed, as they possess the qualities such as reusability, stability, proper communication, modularity, testability, and complexity. The reusable components on integration interoperate with each other resulting in an operational application which is developed with minimum effort and low maintenance cost. We used Component Based Software Development (CBSD) process, which is based on the basic concepts of Object Orientated Techniques where Unified Modelling Language (UML) shows an important role. Different quality factors of a component are measured with the help of metrics, and there are number of metrics proposed for components. In this paper we proposed a methodology of static metrics for integration of software components, complexity metrics for UML Component-based System Specification (CBSS) and interface complexity metrics in a component assembly. These metrics are derived using UML artifacts. We derived these metrics by developing a tool named “CAME” (Component Assembly Metrics Extractor) in NetBeans which parses through the XMI file (XML Meta Data Interchange) generated by UML tool and produces different component metrics through graphic user interface. These metrics will help the software developer in making the system more stable, better and efficient.

Modeling is a key concept in software engineering education, since students need to learn it in order to be able to produce large-scale and reliable software. Quality tools are needed to support modeling in education, but existing tools vary considerably both in their features and in their strengths and weaknesses. The objective of the research presented in this paper was to help professors and students choose tools by determining which strengths and weaknesses matter most to students, which tools exhibit which of these strengths and weaknesses, and how difficult to use are various tools for students. To achieve this objective, we conducted a survey of the use of modeling tools among students in software engineering courses from Brazil, Canada, USA, Spain, Denmark, UK and China. We report the results regarding the 31 UML tools that 117 participants have used, focusing on the nine tools that the students have used most heavily. Common benefits quoted by students in choosing a tool include simplicity of installing and learning, being free, supporting the most important notations and providing code generation. The most cited complaints about tools include lack of feedback, being slow to use, difficulty drawing the diagrams, not interacting well with other tools and being complex to use. This research also compares the results with the findings of another survey conducted among professors who taught modeling. The results should benefit tool developers by suggesting ways they could improve their tools. The results should also help inform the selection of tools by educators and students.

Increasingly, students from many different majors are taking foundational courses in Software Engineering (SE) where modelling forms a major part. Novices with limited Object-Oriented (OO) programming skills often find OO modelling concepts abstract and difficult when compared to other topics. In particular, dynamic modelling of sequence diagrams (SDs) was shown to pose the most difficulties when novices learn UML modelling. Novices often do not consider how SDs are constrained by static models such as class diagrams and fail to meet some of the postconditions specified in the use case descriptions. These problems are exacerbated for instructors teaching large classes unable to give adequate formative feedback in the early stages, leading to poor student satisfaction and learning outcomes. This paper explores the efficacy of using a constructivist-learning tool in large classes able to give immediate feedback in the early stages. In this paper, we report our experience of developing an interactive pedagogical tool called SD4ED to help students learn SDs. The main novelty of our approach is the mechanism devised to provide instant feedback while students are creating the SDs based on the constraints for the underlying static model, postconditions specified for the underlying use case and the current knowledge state aggregating past messages. Unlike other UML tools developed in the past, our tool helps students to create consistent and complete models using a constructivist approach. Our pre- and post-tests and survey feedback showed substantially improved learning outcomes and student satisfaction.

Software Product Line (SPL) has been successfully consolidated as an approach for systematic reuse. The adoption of the SPL approach aims at increasing the reuse of requirements and artifacts, thus reusing documents, source code and artifacts and ensuring better quality control to software production in a large-scale. One of the essential activities for SPL management is the modeling of variability. Variability modeling in UML-based SPL has been carried out mostly using the UML Profiling mechanism, in which new stereotypes and tagged values are created for such purpose. The available option in general-purpose UML tools for exporting UML models is through XMI files, standardized by OMG. This option is important to process XMI files in particular environments or tools, for example, managing variabilities, generating product configurations from an SPL, and even collecting metrics, and estimating SPLs. However, different versions, tool restrictions, and different file standards compromise operations involving XMI files. In this scenario, the industry has increasingly required the supporting tools for the SPL approach. However, the current support tools are mainly restricted to the problem space based on feature modeling and present problems with data integration with other tools. Therefore, we developed SMartyModeling, an environment for engineering UML-based SPLs in which variabilities are modeled as stereotypes using any UML compliant profile. This paper presents an overview of SMartyModeling, describing its motivation, main components, and available features.

Software models in the Unified Modeling Language (UML) can been created or automatically reverse-engineered and used for quickly gaining structural insights into larger, legacy, or unfamiliar software. But as the size, structural complexity, and interdependencies between software components in larger systems grows, two-dimensional viewing and modeling has limitations, and new ways of visualizing larger models and numerous associated diagrams of different types are needed to intuitively convey structural and relational insights. To investigate the feasibility of using Virtual Reality (VR) to create an immersive UML-based software modeling experience, this paper contributes a VR solution concept for visualizing, navigating, modeling, and interacting with software models using UML notation. An implementation shows its feasibility while an empirical evaluation highlights its potential.

Software Product Line (SPL) is a software development approach that systematically applies reuse of artifacts in a specific domain. In the last years, the industry has increasingly required the support of tools for most SPL life cycle activities, targeting feature models and related diagrams, variability management and SPL specific products configuration. However, existing literature does not present any tools with native support to UML-based SPLs. In addition, relying on manipulating XMI files for general-purpose UML tools for such SPLs takes significant effort, and it is time-consuming and error-prone. In this scenario, we developed SMartyModeling, with support to UML stereotype-based variability management. To evolve our tool, we evaluated it throughout a survey answered by 37 participants. We adopted questions from the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and the System Usability Scale (SUS). We organized it into three sections of Likert-scaled questions for usefulness, ease of use, and usability. A last section consisted of open questions focused on positive and negative aspects and an overview of the evalaution. SMartyModeling was well evaluated in relation to usefulness, ease of use, and usability. We analyzed and interpreted the respondents quotes using correlation techniques and open and axial coding. The analysis of open questions allowed us a direct identification of points to improve the tool, its limitations and positive aspects.

Unified Modelling Language (UML) has been conferred as the de facto standard in modeling by majority in the software system development community. Among the various types of diagrams that exist under the umbrella of UML is Sequence Diagram. Sequence Diagrams are capable of modeling interactional behaviours as well as dynamic happenings in a system, and as such are generally used in the modeling of complex software systems. However in this paper, Sequence Diagrams are used in the modeling of the IEEE 802.11 Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) protocol. The Sequence Diagram representing this protocol will then be used for formal, mathematical analysis by first transforming the Sequence Diagram through the MDA model transformation tool called SD2PN, and performing analysis such as liveness analysis, boundedness analysis and reachability analysis of the resulting Petri Net.

Technological growth has been exponential in relation to mobile devices (such as embedded sensors as GPS or accelerometer) that have allowed developing context-aware mobile applications for the market. This growth generates a new challenge about how to support the creation of this kind of application to adapt them to the current user’s demand. Nowadays, there are several approaches that could be used to create context-aware mobile applications, but these approaches are not designed to support variability in the kind of generated applications. The aim of this paper is to propose a building tool that allows generating a wide variety of context-aware mobile applications. Our tool has been designed from scratch considering a taxonomy of variability concepts which help to identify the potential variability points to obtain more flexible building approaches. The first version of our tool is presented which is based on UML tools like Eclipse, Sirius Obeo, and JBoss. Finally, a discussion of different aspects is detailed to help designers to have guidelines to select the appropriate development environment for the design of building tools for context-aware mobile applications.

Context: Software architecture viewpoints modularize the software architectures in terms of different viewpoints that each address a different concern. Unified Modeling Language (UML) is so popular among practitioners for modeling software architectures from different viewpoints. Objective: In this paper, we aimed at understanding the practitioners’ UML usage for the modeling of software architectures from different viewpoints. Method: To this end, 109 practitioners with diverse profiles have been surveyed to understand practitioners’ UML usage for six different viewpoints: functional, information, concurrency, development, deployment, and operational. Each viewpoint has been considered in terms of a set of software models that can be created in that viewpoint. Results: The survey includes 35 questions for different viewpoint models, and the results lead to interesting findings. While the top popular viewpoints for the UML-based software architecture modeling are the functional (96%) and information (99%) viewpoints, the least popular one is the operational viewpoint that is considered by 26% of the practitioners. The top popular UML modeling tool is Enterprise Architect regardless of the viewpoints considered. Concerning the software models that can be created in each viewpoint, UML's class diagram is practitioners’ top choice for the functional structure (71%), data structure (85%), concurrency structure (75%), software code structure (34%), and system installation (39%), and system support (16%) models; UML's sequence diagram is the top choice for the data lifecycle models (47%); UML's deployment diagram for the physical structure (71%), mapping between the functional and physical components (53%), and system migration (21%) models; UML's activity diagram for the data flow (65%), software build and release processes (20–22%), and system administration (36%) models; UML's component diagram for the mapping between the functional and concurrent components (35%), software module structure (47%), and system configuration (21%) models; and UML's package diagram for the software module structure (47%) models. © 2020 Elsevier B.V.

UML diagrams describe different views of one software. These diagrams strongly depend on each other and must therefore be consistent with one another, since inconsistencies between diagrams may be a source of faults during software development activities that rely on these diagrams. It is therefore paramount that consistency rules be defined and that inconsistencies be detected, analyzed and fixed. The relevant literature shows that authors typically define their own consistency rules, sometimes defining the same rules and sometimes defining rules that are already in the UML standard. The reason might be that no consolidated set of rules that are relevant by authors can be found to date. The aim of our research is to provide an up to date, consolidated set of UML consistency rules and obtain a detailed overview of the current research in this area. We therefore followed a systematic procedure in order to collect from literature up to March 2017 and analyze UML consistency rules. We then consolidated a set of 119 UML consistency rules (avoiding redundant definitions or definitions already in the UML standard), which can be used as an important reference for UML-based software development activities, for teaching UML-based software development, and for further research.

In the paper we consider a method for mining so-called “hybrid” UML models, that refers to software process mining. Models are built from execution traces of information systems with service-oriented architecture (SOA), given in the form of event logs. While common reverse engineering techniques usually require the source code, which is often unavailable, our approach deals with event logs which are produced by a lot of information systems, and some heuristic parameters. Since an individual type of UML diagrams shows only one perspective of a system’s model, we propose to mine a combination of various types of UML diagrams (namely, sequence and activity ), which are considered together with communication diagrams. This allows us to increase the expressive power of the individual diagram. Each type of diagram correlates with one of three levels of abstraction (workflow, interaction and operation), which are commonly used while considering web-service interaction. The proposed algorithm consists of four tasks. They include splitting an event log into several parts and building UML sequence, activity and communication diagrams. We also propose to encapsulate some insignificant or low-level implementation details (such as internal service operations) into activity diagrams and connect them with a more general sequence diagram by using interaction use semantics. To cope with a problem of immense size of synthesized UML sequence diagrams, we propose an abstraction technique based on regular expressions. The approach is evaluated by using a developed software tool as a Windows-application in C#. It produces UML models in the form of XML-files. The latter are compatible with well-known Sparx Enterprise Architect and can be further visualized and utilized by that tool.

The model-based analysis is receiving a wide acceptance as compare to code-based analysis in the context of prioritizing and guiding the testing effort and speeding up the development process. Ordinarily, system analysts as well as developers follow Unified Modeling Language (UML) activity diagrams to render all realizable flows of controls commonly recognized as scenarios of use cases. This paper applies a bio-inspired algorithm to produce test scenarios for the concurrent section in UML activity diagram. Here, the heuristic draws its inspiration from the internal mechanism of the slime mould Physarum Polycephalum , a large single-celled amoeboid organism. Simulations are performed using eight subject systems taken from the LINDHOLMEN data-set, two models taken from real life student projects and five synthetic models. The results obtained through different approaches are validated through the statistical analysis which demonstrates that our proposed approach is better than the existing Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and Genetic Algorithm (GA) by a number of feasible test scenarios generated.

Nowadays, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) is the most successful notation for the design of object-oriented applications. However, plain UML is not enough to characterize the web presentation tier of enterprise applications, including the navigational, structural and role-based access control (RBAC) features present in these applications. In this paper, we present Enterprise Web Application Extension (E-WAE), a lightweight UML extension for the modeling of these elements, which permits the inclusion of multitier, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and security design-level patterns in the models. Our approach follows a Model-Driven Development (MDD) approach, which enables the automatic generation of intermediate platform-specific models and automatic code generation for JavaServer Faces (JSF) and Active Server Pages.NET Model-View-Controller (ASP.NET MVC) frameworks. In addition, this generated code can be used as a low-cost mockup for early client validation of the navigational, structural and RBAC features of enterprise applications. E-WAE has been used with different applications. In this paper, we refer to the checkout process in the Amazon website, the delete resources use case in OdAJ2EE, an educational application developed by us, and the US Library of Congress Online Catalog search facility as examples of its applicability.

Purpose The development of context-aware applications in ubiquitous environments depends not only on the user interactions but also on several context parameters. The handling of these parameters is a fundamental problem in these systems. The key purpose of this work is to enrich the unified modeling language (UML) class diagram with new constructs to provide a universal model capable of coping with the context-awareness concerns. Design/methodology/approach The authors provide a review of existing context handling approaches. Afterward, they relied on the UML extensibility mechanisms to propose a heavyweight extension for the UML class diagram. This generic approach allows describing the different context parameters since the modeling phase. Findings Existing solutions for context handling apply the contextual constraints on finished applications or tend to be dependent on a specific development process. This paper presents a solution based on UML, which allows dealing with context since the modeling phase, and independently of development processes. This proposal is implemented as an eclipse editor and illustrated through a case study in the healthcare field. Originality/value This paper addresses the problem of context handling, and it presents a review of the foremost existing solutions. The paper also presents a heavyweight extension for the UML class diagram, which consists in enriching it with additional constructs, capable of monitoring how applications are linked to context parameters and how the values of these parameters may affect the application behavior.

An important characteristic of real-time systems is to produce the expected results within the predefined time period. Efficient scheduling of multiple tasks and utilization of shared resources amo...

Different modelling approaches have been proposed to automate the process of design and development of data warehouse. Some of them use the model driven architecture, however they are more focused on designing platform independent model (PIM) and platform specific model (PSM) and reserved unfortunately few efforts for requirements modelling and design computational independent model (CIM). This situation can be explained essentially by the presence of mature technologies and methods used for the representation of PIM and PSM models. Moreover, there are no standards to build CIM. Within this context, data warehousing projects fail due to not much attention paid on the requirement analysis phase. To overcome this problem, this study provides an approach to build a CIM architecture for modelling data warehouse requirements using an unified modelling language (UML) profile that extends the use cases and business process models, and proposes requirements specifications using SBVR structured English.

One of the ways to specify dynamic behavior in UML is to model interactions between objects with sequence diagrams, and model the behavior of each object with state machines. In this context, the problem of ensuring consistency between the sequence diagrams and state machines may arise. To verify consistency, the authors propose an approach based on compositions of Büchi automata which allow us to capture the evolution of each object among the lifeline. This paper focuses on UML modeling and verification methods and bridges the gap between theoretical studies on formal semantics and practical studies to implement languages through model transformations. The transformations include basic interactions, state invariants, strict and weak sequencing, and alternative interaction fragments. Ultimately, the results of the transformations are integrated into the Spin model checker as a never claim property. The authors use the Automatic Gate Controller Railway (AGCR) as an example to illustrate their approach.

Software usage model can be used as a guide when generate reliability test cases and it helps to evaluate the reliability of the software. Recent researches of deriving Markov Chain usage model from UML Model are mostly based on the UML sequence diagram and UML component diagram. But there are some problems with the existing methods: for some large software systems, there are many kinds of users who use the software in different ways, while a general usage model is not targeted and not suitable for all users. For this reason,this paper puts forward a new method to construct user-based software usage model. The method constructs usage model according to the UML activity diagram and UML use-case diagram, the model constructed by this method is user-based: the model describes, for every kind of users, the specific interacting process between the user and the system. What’s more, the model can be used to guide test cases generation.

This research mainly is focused on automation of Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams from the analyzed requirement text using Natural Language Processing (NLP). The looks and styles of software engineering have been completely changed in the recent times. Presently, software engineering follows the rules of Object Oriented design patterns. All phases of software engineering are deviating from the conventions and new paradigms are more popular these days. Same is the case with Software analysis process which uses Unified Modeling Language to map and model the user requirements. Analysis is the key process of building modern information system applications and base for the robust and vigorous software application’s design and development. Nowadays everybody needs a quick and reliable service. It was necessary to have some sort of quick, accurate and intelligent software for generating UML based documentations to save time and budget of both the user and system analyst

OPC Unified Architecture (UA) is a platform-independent standard for message-based communication between clients and servers on various types of network to facilitate information exchange. OPC UA has been adopted in various domains such as power grids, building automation, and smart devices to support interoperability of involved systems. These domains also use Unified Modeling Language (UML) as the standard notation for data modeling or system modeling. Use of two different notations in the same domain causes compatibility issues. To address this, we present an approach for transforming OPC UA to UML to improve their compatibility and integration. In the approach, we rigorously analyze the semantics of OPC UA elements and establish a mapping between OPC UA elements and UML elements based on the analysis. Based on the mapping, we define transformation algorithms using Query/View/Transformation (QVT) which is a standard model transformation language by OMG. We demonstrate the approach using case examples in the power grid, building automation, and smart device domains. HighlightsOPC UA and UML are analyzed for correspondence.Mappings are established between OPC UA elements and UML elements.Based on the mappings, transformation rules are defined in QVT.Three case examples are presented demonstrating transformation.

We propose a multi-scale methodology for complex software systems using the model transformation techniques. The methodol- ogy provides a correct by design approach for the description of multi-scale architectures. It is founded on a rule-oriented iterative modeling process ensuring transition from a coarse-grained description to a fine-grained description. The rules manage the re- finement between scales and are applied with respect to the system constraints. Multi-scale architectures are modeled graphically using UML notations. The design process supports model transformation and validation of UML models with the OCL constraints defined on UML models. We illustrate our approach with a case study dedicated to the smart cities.

Human Resources Information System is a Decision Support System that provides necessary information regarding human resources in an organization. Web-based e-HR is one of the best practical solution in human resources management that allows employees to focus more on their job instead of HR administration procedures. By implementing Employee Self Service (ESS) it is expected that worker satisfaction can be improved and in turn will also improve employees’ performance. The web-based ESS is characterized by personalized information approach which offers personal and management services on information access and structured workflow process. The object covered in this research is HR administration of PT. BCP to create and implement ESS with system prototype development and UML modeling tool. The resulting system is designed to quickly access the information and company procedures to shorten the time for BCP’s employee administration and documentation

The layered software architecture is the model commonly adopted for the development of information systems since it favors the modularity and the scalability of the systems. On the other hand, the emergence of model engineering aims to raise the level of abstraction to allow developers to reason on models, and less in code. The research question is to combine the two approaches to facilitate the work of developers. The proposal resulting from this study is based on a set of concepts defined using the UML profiles. These concepts include services, business components, and data persistence. Then the Kruchten model is adopted to represent the development cycle according to several views, each view being represented by UML diagrams derived from the previously defined profiles. Finally, rules are available for checking inter-view consistency, from refinement to code generation. The result is a step towards the definition of a domain specific ADL and a development process as much as it includes the expected characteristics of such a language, namely: the fundamental concepts, the support tools and the multiview development.

The development of e-commerce today, especially agribusiness has very good prospects. Demand for ornamental plants and fruits is still very high, especially the demand for mangoes is very high at around 80%. The purpose of this research is to build an e-commerce information system for online mango fruit stores. E-Commerce System Mangga Mandalagiri online shop, designed to promote, sell and manage sales data, and can improve performance in the store sales business online Mandalagiri. The system development method that is used is the method for Object-Oriented namely RAD using UML tools. The results of this study are to help Mandalagiri's online stores sell, introduce, promote and manage mangoes in a manner.

For the evolution and maintenance of legacy systems, it is essential that they are reverse engineered. It is becoming important because in many Legacy systems, suitable documentation is not available which makes maintenance. The proposed approach extracts hidden information which is useful for maintaining a software. Application modeling and data modeling are essential for the development of the software and are used for designing application and database separately. Generally, in software systems application layer is the object-oriented programming language and database is the backend store. Modeling of these layers separately creates inconsistency. This paper proposes a technique to reverse engineer the database schema to UML model which will incorporate modeling of an object-oriented technology on top of purely relational database. Using this conversion of database schema to UML diagram, the gap between these layers is being bridged. It will provide the understanding of the legacy system in a better way. The database schema is converted into XMI format which can be imported in a UML modeling tool. The proposed approach converts the SQL database schema as well as more frequently used SELECT statements for the schema into UML model which is in the form of XMI. By importing the generated XMI file into MagicDraw, UML model is graphically represented.

The preliminary phase of the software development life cycle is Requirements engineering that is nearest to the user’s world. This phase contains tasks that are knowledge concentrated. Therefore, the practice of Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) for modelling this knowledge would be worthful assistance. Accordingly, predicting significant requirements is essential. When poorly identified, numerous problems happen, such as budget overrun, software failures and schedule overrun. However, this phase is usually not performed and skipped by assuming as an inconsequential phase. Significant requirements identification become more vital and challenging when the complexity of the software increases. Therefore, managers and developers recurrently lose confidence in software artifacts. Wavering in the developer’s confidence may in return distress the decisions of which requirement is to implement first. In this paper Bayesian belief network (BBN) approach for predicting significant requirements is proposed to solve the problem by UML Profile mechanism. This probabilistic model supports in accomplishing the uncertainties and inaccuracy generally exists in the requirements engineering process. It makes the prediction more precise, intuitionistic and reasonable. The Profile is imported into a UML tool, which helps in prompt validation of meta-model concepts in practice. The approach is practicable in a realistic context and addresses uncertainties.

Software design has a main impact in the quality of the software systems. Anti-patterns are shortcomings exist in the software designs and impact negatively software quality. Mobile applications (apps) with anti-patterns have bad quality and short lifetime. Many empirical studies have assessed that the anti-patterns have a negative impact on change-proneness, fault-proneness, memory consumption and energy efficiency. In addition to that, many studies showed that there was an improvement in the user interface and memory performance of mobile apps when correcting Android anti-patterns. The aim of our research is choosing the suitable UML modeling environment to detect Mobile applications' anti-patterns via reverse engineering. So, in this research, first we present a comparative study between nine UML tools for determining the tools that have the functionality for (reverse, forward) engineering and have the ability for validating the model against the anti-patterns. Second, we apply our proposed method to generate the class diagram model of the apps through decoding the Java source code and detects the design anti-patterns in the model. For validating the proposed method, we applied it in twenty-nine Mobile apps which were downloaded from APKmirror. The proposed method detects and treats ten anti-patterns which have appeared 749 times in the twenty-nine apps.

UML sequence diagrams are used to graphically describe the message interactions between the objects participating in a certain scenario. Combined fragments extend the basic functionality of UML sequence diagrams with control structures, such as sequences, alternatives, iterations, or parallels. In this paper, we present a UML profile to annotate sequence diagrams with combined fragments to model timed Web services with distributed resources under the publish/subscribe paradigm. This profile is exploited to automatically obtain a representation of the system based on Colored Petri nets using a novel model-to-model (M2M) transformation. This M2M transformation has been specified using QVT and has been integrated in a new add-on extending a state-of-the-art UML modeling tool. Generated Petri nets can be immediately used in well-known Petri net software, such as CPN Tools, to analyze the system behavior. Hence, our model-to-model transformation tool allows for simulating the system and finding design errors in early stages of system development, which enables us to fix them at these early phases and thus potentially saving development costs.

Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a standardised Object Management Group (OMG) notation among software engineers. There have been many attempts to design alternatives to UML. Recently, new notations such as Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) and Decision Model and Notation (DMN) have been proposed for modelling processes and decisions. These dedicated notations provide a simpler way of capturing functional requirements in a designer-friendly fashion. Moreover, some concepts as rules cannot be directly modelled in UML. Our research considers a method of translating business models such as BPMN and DMN into a set of consistent UML models, which can be later used by business analysts and developers to understand and implement the system. As a single notation design, it allows the user to take advantage of software supporting UML modelling and consistency checking, in addition using such translation can provide additional insights into OMG business models. Furthermore, the design provided in a single notation can be easier to follow and develop. This approach supports also visualisation of rules. It is important to mention that the proposed solution does not extend any custom UML artifacts and can be used with standard UML tools.

Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a modeling language widely used in the field of software engineering. It is a standard to visualize the design of a system structurally and behaviorally. UML tools are software tools used to create UML diagrams, perform model and diagram interchange, model transformation, code generation, reverse engineering and round-trip engineering, There are many free UML tools available to be downloaded in the internet. This paper serves as a survey for ten UML tools and gives recommendation to users on which UML tools to be used in different situations. The main contribution of the paper is to compare the ten up to date UML tools in several aspects.

The power system transition to smart grids brings challenges to electricity distribution network development since it involves several stakeholders and actors whose needs must be met to be successful for the electricity network upgrade. The technological challenges arise mainly from the various distributed energy resources (DERs) integration and use and network optimization and security. End-customers play a central role in future network operations. Understanding the network’s evolution through possible network operational scenarios could create a dedicated and reliable roadmap for the various stakeholders’ use. This paper presents a method to develop the evolving operational scenarios and related management schemes, including microgrid control functionalities, and analyzes the evolution of electricity distribution networks considering medium and low voltage grids. The analysis consists of the dynamic descriptions of network operations and the static illustrations of the relationships among classified actors. The method and analysis use an object-oriented and standardized software modeling language, the unified modeling language (UML). Operational descriptions for the four evolution phases of electricity distribution networks are defined and analyzed by Enterprise Architect, a UML tool. This analysis is followed by the active management architecture schemes with the microgrid control functionalities. The graphical models and analysis generated can be used for scenario building in roadmap development, real-time simulations, and management system development. The developed method, presented with high-level use cases (HL-UCs), can be further used to develop and analyze several parallel running control algorithms for DERs providing ancillary services (ASs) in the evolving electricity distribution networks.

Software metrics have become an essential part of software development because of their importance in estimating cost, effort, and time during the development phase. Many metrics have been proposed to assess different software quality attributes, including stability. A number of software stability metrics have been proposed at the class, architecture, and system levels. However, these metrics typically target the source code. This paper proposes a software stability metrics suite at the model level for three UML diagrams: class, use case, and sequence. These three diagrams represent the most common diagrams in the three UML views: structural, functional, and behavioral. We introduce a client–master assessment approach to avoid measurement duplication. We also theoretically and empirically validate the proposed metrics suite. We also provide examples to demonstrate the use of the proposed metrics and their application as indicators of software stability.

Providing a complete life cycle of UML consistency management process.Presenting a thematic taxonomy of existing state-of-the-art UML consistency management activities based on a set of parameters extracted from the literature.Analytically comparing current state-of-the-art UML consistency management approaches including their commonalities and differences.Outlining a number of potential research issues in this field of study. Unified Modeling Language (UML) has become the de-facto standard to design todays large-size object-oriented systems. However, focusing on multiple UML diagrams is a main cause of breaching the consistency problem, which ultimately reduces the overall software models quality. Consistency management techniques are widely used to ensure the model consistency by correct model-to-model and model-to-code transformation. Consistency management becomes a promising area of research especially for model-driven architecture. In this paper, we extensively review UML consistency management techniques. The proposed techniques have been classified based on the parameters identified from the research literature. Moreover, we performed a qualitative comparison of consistency management techniques in order to identify current research trends, challenges and research gaps in this field of study. Based on the results, we concluded that researchers have not provided more attention on exploring inter-model and semantic consistency problems. Furthermore, state-of-the-art consistency management techniques mostly focus only on three UML diagrams (i.e., class, sequence and state chart) and the remaining UML diagrams have been overlooked. Consequently, due to this incomplete body of knowledge, researchers are unable to take full advantage of overlooked UML diagrams, which may be otherwise useful to handle the consistency management challenge in an efficient manner.

ContextBusiness process modeling is an activity that includes several different roles, e.g. business analysts, technical analysts and software developers. The resulting process diagrams can be either simple or complex. Nonetheless, they must be understandable to everyone, even those without the necessary knowledge of process modeling notations. ObjectiveThe goal of our research was to evaluate intuitive understandability of diagrams, modeled in different process modeling notations, with regard to diagram complexity. MethodAn empirical research was conducted, including 103 students with the goal to empirically validate the intuitiveness of the diagrams, modeled in most commonly used process modeling notations, i.e. Unified Modeling Language 2.0 Activity Diagram (UML AD), Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) and Event Driven Process Chain (EPC). Results were analyzed using the Kruskal-Wallis test, together with the Mann-Whitney post hoc tests with Bonferroni correction. ResultsIn the case of processes with lesser complexity, participants using BPMN diagrams were significantly outperformed by those using either EPC or UML AD ones. However, when complexity of processes was higher, participants using EPC diagrams performed significantly worse than those using the UML AD and BPMN counterparts. Moreover, participants that used UML AD diagrams were not significantly outperformed by users of diagrams in other process modeling notations, regardless of their complexity. Thus, UML AD was recognized as being the most versatile notation. ConclusionSince the existing studies do not offer a holistic overview of the intuitive understandability of process diagrams with different complexity, modeled in different process modeling notations, our research can help decide which notation to use when representing processes that have to be understandable by all stakeholders. Lower complexity BPMN diagrams were outperformed by EPC or UML AD ones.Higher complexity EPC diagrams were outperformed by BPMN or UML AD ones.UML AD was recognized as being the most versatile notation.Our study can help decide which notation to use when representing processes.

Solution for modelling and generation of explicit links in UML composite structures.Five connection patterns for condensed modelling of complex topologies.UML profile with stereotypes and validity constraints for connection patterns.Semantic rules for generating explicit links based on connection patterns.Generation algorithm and proof-of-concept implementing the generation algorithm. Model-driven engineering can help in mitigating ever-growing complexity of modern software systems. In this sense, the Unified Modelling Language (UML) has gained a thick share in the market of modelling languages adopted in industry. Nevertheless, the generality of UML can make it hard to build complete code generators, simulators, model-based analysis or testing tools without setting variability in the semantics of the language. To tailor semantics variability the notion of semantic variation point has been introduced in UML 2.0.Our research focuses on the semantic variation point that leaves the rules for matching multiplicities of connected instances of components and ports undecided in UML composite structures. In order to allow model analysability, simulation and code generation, this semantics needs to be set. At the same time, leaving the burden of this task to the developers is often overwhelming for complex systems.In this paper we provide a solution for supporting modelling and automatic calculation and generation of explicit interconnections in complex UML composite structures. This is achieved by (i) defining a set of connection patterns, in terms of a UML profile, and related semantic rules for driving the calculation, (ii) providing a generation algorithm to calculate the explicit interconnections.