A Feature-Driven Approach to Automated Class Diagram Construction

Abstract

Internetware denotes a type of complex distributed software system, which executes in an open, uncertain and dynamic environment, and adapts itself to changes in the environment. An important problem in the researches of Internetware is how to automatically construct the Internetware application that realizes the new requirements resulted from changes in the environment. In this paper, we focus on the automated construction of an important realization artifact of an Internetware application: the class diagram. A feature-driven approach is taken to automatically construct class diagrams. The approach consists of two components: a feature model utilized to model all the requirements that an Internetware application has to realize in different environments; the transformation rules from this feature model to class diagrams for automated class diagram construction. With this approach, once the requirements specific to an environment is given, the class diagram realizing the requirements can be constructed with the transformation rules automatically. To support the formal specification of the transformation rules, we design a transformation description language TDL4CD. Furthermore, several criteria for checking the validity of transformation rules written in TDL4CD is provided to support the construction of class diagrams. The usability of TDL4CD, as well as the feasibility of automatically constructing a class diagram with transformation rules in TDL4CD are preliminarily evaluated with 2 case studies.