Using Patterns to Integrate UML Views

Authors: Alexander Egyed

Patterns play a major role during system composition (synthesis) in fostering the reuse of repeatable design and architecture configurations. This paper investigates how knowledge about patterns may also be used for system analysis to verify the conceptual integrity of the system model.

To support an automated analysis process, this work introduces a view integration framework. Since each view (e.g. diagram) adds an additional perspective of the software system to the model, information from one view may be used to validate the integrity of other views. This form of integration requires a deeper understanding as to what the views mean and what information they can share (or constrain). Knowledge about patterns, both in structure and behavior, are thereby a valuable source for view integration automation.