The Value Of UML Profiles In The Modelling Process

Patterns were first applied to OO program design, but over time patterns have been identified for analysis, project management, systems architecture and more. What are UML Profiles, and what is their value to the modelling process?

Discussion

The UML profiles are the some of the profiles that are used for the purpose of the generic mechanism for customizing the model of UML designs that constrained to particular domains and the different sorts of platforms. According to Gómez et al. 2016, right from the initiation of the generic mechanism of the UML profiles, there have been a lot of profiles that have been developed over the years. These profiles are mostly available by the standardization of OMG. In the industries, as well the practical value of the profiles has been granted as the modelling tools of the modern days that are destined towards delivering the previously defined stereotypes that already covered by the profiles. The purpose of this assignment is focussed upon analytically reporting the various structures of the UML profiles and their values for the modelling processes.

UML or the Unified Modified Language is one of the mostly used standards that solely focusses on the specification and the documentation of the information systems. According to Basso et al. 2015, the UML can be used a general purpose notation but this fact that that it is a general purpose notation may limit the adaptability of modelling to some specific domains that may require the involvement of the specialized languages. The UML is one type of modelling language that focusses on the various processes of modelling. The UML is definite enough to provide a set of extension mechanisms for addressing the above mentioned issue that inherently dedicated towards the personalisation and the extension of the self syntaxes and the various forms of the semantics with the purpose of adapting some specific application domains.

The UML profiles mainly focusses on the various processes of modelling. According to Petrasch and Hentschke 2016, the modelling processes of these system requirements is mainly concerned with the handling of the formally expressing constraints  and the necessities that have an effect on the behavioural model of the system to have an allowance of the verification with the help of the real or the stimulated experiments. The requirement of the model for the requirements of the system and also for the methods and the techniques that focuses on the model based approaches that are capable of supporting the modelling, evaluation, and authentication of the requirements and constraints with their traceability are bigger in the present days than the days of the past.

In the field of engineering, there have been a lot of the research activities that entitled towards the system design phases. However, a little to no emphasis have been done on the practices and the approaches that are specifically focussed towards dealing with the analysis, modelling and the authentication of the requirements in an assimilated framework. One of the main issues for such an inadequacy can be associated with the support given during the verification and the validation of the modelling system.

There are various types of the UML profiles found in the domain of computer languages. Two of such UML profiles that may be adopted for the annotation of the non-functional requirements are the Schedule, Performance, Time or the SPT UML profile and the UML profile for the Quality of Service or the QoS.

Background

Analysis done by Shorin and Zimmermann, 2013 says that the SPT profile was initially used for the extension of the UML with basic timing and the concurrency concepts and also for the expression of the requirements and the properties that are required for the conduction of the schedulability and the analysis of the performance. Studies reflect that the timeline of OMG for the SPT profiles began with the notation of Request for Proposals or the RFP in the year of 1999. The SPT profile was effective and was implemented in two UML tools and served the purpose of the analysis of the schedulability and the performance by the various groups. Viewpoint of Perez-Palacin, Mirandola and Merseguer, 2014, suggests that on the contrary to the SPT profile that focusses on the two types of analysis, the more advanced version of the UML profile is the QoS. The QoS profile has a broader scope that helps in the allowance of the user for defining a wider range of the requirements of the QoS along with the properties. The advanced UML profile QoS was adopted by the OMG in the year of 2004. This profile is now being improved by the Finalization Task Force that goes before the formal adoption.

Figure 1: SPT annotation of the communication diagram

(Source: Internet)

The criteria of the type of the analysis supported is different for two different UML profiles. According to Guillén et al. 2013, the QoS profile is supportive enough for the handling of the definite types of the non-functional requirements along with the properties of software systems for the various types of analysis such as the schedulability, durability and performance. On the other hand, Aziz, Mohamad and Jawawi, 2013, contradicts that the SPT profile supports the annotation of the system models of UML either for the analysis of the schedualbility or the analysis of the performance. However, unlike the QoS profile, the SPT profile does not support the analysis of durability.

The criteria of the annotation in the system model also distinctly compares the UML profile of QoS to that of the SPT profile of the UML. The QoS profile supports a total of three types of annotating systems models. According to García-Valls et al. 2013, there is no clear scope of establishing which type of annotation supersedes the other in terms of quality for the specification of the provided constraint of QoS. This depends both on the modeller and also on the tool capability of the UML. On the other hand, in terms of the SPT annotation, there is one specific way to annotate system models that is involved in the application of the stereotypes on the proper model elements and also in the assigning of the values to the itineraries of application.

Figure 2: QoS annotation of the communication diagram

(Source: Internet)

  In accordance with the context of the UML profiles there are a several challenges that go in parallel with the implementation of the UML profiles. According to Iqbal et al. 2015, these general challenges and issues faced with the working of the UML profiles include unnecessary throw of slangs without the glossary, teasing, lack of examples, errors in the BNF Rules and No Rules for the Element Names. 

Discussion of the Ideas

There was glossary as part of the specifications of UML until the 2.0 version but was removed thereafter. The next challenge of the UML specification is the teasing where the teasing where it becomes very confusing for the users to make sense of the two sections of the same syntax. The apprehension of the syntaxes often leads to a countless errors. The third challenge that is in context with the UML profiles is the lack of examples. According to Nikolaidou et al. 2015, there is a lack of textual description in the depiction of the elements inside the UML. The description is provided with the help of diagrams since UML is a visual modelling language. There are also several errors in context with the describing of the syntaxes of the UML elements. The UML profiles has the no rules set for the element names. As there are no set of definite rules for the declaration of the elements it becomes very tough with the declaration of elements as discrepancies may creep up in the declaration of these elements.

Conclusion

The UML or the Unified Modified Language was originally developed as a general purpose language with the capability of modelling any type of system that was previously used for the variety of the domains. The assignment discusses the various aspects of the UML over time patterns that have been identified for analysis, project management, systems architecture and more. The background of the UML profiles have been discussed at the first and then the comparison between the UML profile of QoS and the SPT UML profile has been discussed. Ultimately this report has been subjected with the challenges that occurs with the modelling process of the UML profiles has been discussed.

From the analysis of the comparison between the two UML profiles, it is recommended that the QoS UML profile is advantageous to SPT UML profile since the QoS supports schedulability, durability and performance.

References

Aziz, M.W., Mohamad, R. and Jawawi, D.N., 2013. Critical evaluation of two UML profiles for Distributed Embedded Real-Time Systems Design. Int. J. Softw. Eng. Appl, 7(3), pp.137-146.

Basso, T., Montecchi, L., Moraes, R., Jino, M. and Bondavalli, A., 2015, October. Towards a UML profile for privacy-aware applications. In Computer and Information Technology; Ubiquitous Computing and Communications; Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing; Pervasive Intelligence and Computing (CIT/IUCC/DASC/PICOM), 2015 IEEE International Conference on (pp. 371-378). IEEE.

García-Valls, M., Basanta-Val, P., Marcos, M. and Estévez, E., 2013. A bi-dimensional QoS model for SOA and real-time middleware. Int. J. Comput. Sci. Eng.

Gómez, A., Merseguer, J., Di Nitto, E. and Tamburri, D.A., 2016, July. Towards a UML profile for data intensive applications. In proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Quality-Aware DevOps (pp. 18-23). ACM.

Guillén, J., Miranda, J., Murillo, J.M. and Canal, C., 2013, September. A UML Profile for modeling multicloud applications. In European Conference on Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing (pp. 180-187). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Iqbal, M.Z., Ali, S., Yue, T. and Briand, L., 2015. Applying UML/MARTE on industrial projects: challenges, experiences, and guidelines. Software & Systems Modeling, 14(4), pp.1367-1385.

Nikolaidou, M., Kapos, G.D., Tsadimas, A., Dalakas, V. and Anagnostopoulos, D., 2015, May. Simulating SysML models: Overview and challenges. In SoSE (pp. 328-333).

Perez-Palacin, D., Mirandola, R. and Merseguer, J., 2014. On the relationships between QoS and software adaptability at the architectural level. Journal of Systems and Software, 87, pp.1-17.

Petrasch, R. and Hentschke, R., 2016, July. Process modeling for Industry 4.0 applications: Towards an Industry 4.0 process modeling language and method. In Computer Science and Software Engineering (JCSSE), 2016 13th International Joint Conference on (pp. 1-5). IEEE.

Shorin, D. and Zimmermann, A., 2013, April. Evaluation of embedded system energy usage with extended uml models. In 2nd Workshop EASED@ BUIS 2013 (p. 21).