Development of an Autonomous Transport System using UML-RT

Capturing the system requirements and integrating them into a well balanced system architecture is a key issue in the development of reactive software systems. In this report, we explore by means of a case study how an architecture can be derived systematically for systems whose communication model is based on broadcasting. We are especially interested in two important questions: can the derivation of the architecture be automated by generation algorithms, and are the description techniques used in practice today an adequate basis for such a development process? We address the second question by applying UML-RT, a profile of the widely used Unified Modeling Language (UML) which focuses on embedded system applications, on the modeling of requirements and architecture of an autonomous transport system. Adequate graphical description techniques for capturing interaction scenarios which include broadcasting are unavailable so far. We introduce an extension to the UML's sequence diagrams (SDs) to capture broadcasting scenarios. We also address the combinations of SDs to describe complex scenarios, their hierarchical refinement, and the embedding of broadcasting into UML-RT's architectural description techniques, and discuss the specification of additional constraints within the Object Constraint Language (OCL). To support an automatic synthetization of an architecture from scenarios, we present an algorithm which generates capsule diagrams from scenarios modeled using SDs. Furthermore, we discuss the adaption of an existing algorithm which generates statecharts from MSCs to fit with their dialects used in UML-RT, namely UML-RT statecharts and sequence diagrams.     «

Capturing the system requirements and integrating them into a well balanced system architecture is a key issue in the development of reactive software systems. In this report, we explore by means of a case study how an architecture can be derived systematically for systems whose communication model is based on broadcasting. We are especially interested in two important questions: can the derivation of the architecture be automated by generation algorithms, and are the description techniques used...     »