Using Stereotypes of the Unified Modeling Language in Mechatronic Systems

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is the standard design language for developing object oriented applications. It is widely used in the development of complex systems for general-purpose computers. In heterogeneous domains like mechatronics exist a lot of special-purpose programming languages, which are not always easily to map to UML concepts. For such reasons the UML provides an extension mechanism, called stereotyping. This can be used for the mapping of domain-specific languages to the UML. Our approach is to use UML within a mechatronic system for the integration of different specialized design and programming languages. As a placeholder for a system component, which is modeled by such a language, we define domain specific stereotypes. In this paper we compare advantages and drawbacks of using stereotypes by an example stereotype: the Function Block Adapter (FBA). An FBA allows the interoperability between the UML and function blocks of the IEC 61131-3.