Discussion of use cases and UML often focuses on the UML use case diagram. Use case diagrams are contrasted (usually unfavorably) with text use cases. But specification of use cases with UML is not limited to the use case diagram. In fact UML 2 includes a variety of expressive techniques for specifying a use case. This article looks at UML use cases from the ODP viewpoint, and describes UML use...

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) community has started to define so-called profiles in order to better suit the needs of specific domains or settings. Product lines1 represent a special breed of systems—they are extensible semi-finished pieces of software. Completing the semi-finished software leads to various software pieces, typically specific applications, which share the same core. Thoug...

While increasing progressively its expressive power, UML has become more and more difficult to read and understand, especially for beginners. To teach the whole UML is not possible, therefore teachers only deal with a subset of UML. We present a framework for defining precisely a consistent subset of a language, allowing everybody to define his/her own subset. An extended example shows a way to...

The translation from UML specifications to B gives a way to analyse rigorously UML specifications via their corresponding B formal specifications, thanks to B support tools. This paper presents a B-based consistency model for UML specifications composed of class, object and realisation diagrams for UML operations. The consistency model consists of proof obligations for the B specification deriv...

Since the emergence of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) in 1996, the UML has become the de-facto standard language for modeling software systems and been widely used in various areas including enterprise information systems, web applications, and business modeling. The extension mechanisms in the UML further stretch its application to specific domains such as the security domain and the dist...

In the last decade UML has emerged as the standard object-oriented conceptual modeling language. Since UML is a combination of previous languages, such as OOSE, OMT, Statecharts, etc., the creation of multi-views within UML was unavoidable. These views, which represent different aspects of system structure and behavior, overlap, raising consistency and integration problems. Moreover, the object...

Giving a formal semantic to an UML Activity diagram (UML AD) is a hard task. The reason of this difficulty is the ambiguity and the absence of a precise formal semantic of such semi-formal formalism. A variety of semantics exist in the literature having tackled the aspects covered by this language. We can give as example denotational, functional and compositional semantics. To cope with the rec...

Models defined using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) are nowadays common parts of software documentations, specifications and sometimes even implementations. However, there is a broad variety of how UML is used. Reasons can be found, for example, in the lack of generally accepted modeling norms and guidelines, the semi-formal semantics of UML, or the complexity of the language. In practice,...

This paper is the sixth in a series of articles examining data modeling in the Unified Modeling Language (UML) from the perspective of Object Role Modeling (ORM). Part 1 discussed historical background, design criteria for modeling languages, object reference and single-valued attributes. Part 2 covered multi-valued attributes, basic constraints, and instantiation using UML object diagrams or O...

In the upcoming Unified Modeling Language specification (UML 2.0), subclassing (i.e., generalization between classes) has a much more precise meaning with respect to overriding than it had in earlier UML versions. Although it is not expressed explicitly, UML 2.0 has a covariant overriding rule for methods, attributes, and associations. In this paper, we first precisely explain how overriding is...