Model-Driven Development of UML-Based Domain-Specific Languages for System Architecture Variants

摘要

The rising overall complexity of modern complex systems leads to an increasing number of decisions made during system design. To achieve efficient, resource saving systems, modern engineering methods and techniques are necessary. Model-based approaches are widely applied in systems engineering, using several types of models in the development phases at different abstraction levels. Model-based design of complex systems benefits from the early validation of design decisions. Indirect optimization with simulation-based validation can be used to determine optimal system solutions. A method for model-driven optimization of system architectures based on the UML standard has been proposed in our earlier work and implemented in a software framework.This paper describes our approach to specify domain-specific languages and corresponding domain-specific tools. The specifications are based on UML extensions using profiles only, which is a lightweight approach compared to other proposals. This allows the reuse and extension of existing UML models. A domain-specific graphical editor for system architecture variants is presented based on the specified extensions. The resulting graphical editor is used to model system architecture variants as an example.