Advanced visual modelling: beyond UML

Abstract

With the adoption of UML by the OMG and industry as the lingua-franca of visual systems modelling, one begins to ponder what will come next in this field? This tutorial brings a vision for visual modelling beyond UML. We present and consolidate radical new notations, proposed in a series of research papers and with quickly increasing adoption by industry, for the specification of complex systems in an intuitive visual, yet precise manner. The recurring theme of these notations is the upgrading of familiar diagrams into a powerful visual language. Spider diagrams considerably extend Venn diagrams to the specification of object-oriented (OO) systems. Most familiar OO concepts are translated into set-theoretical terms: classes into sets of objects, inheritance corresponding to subsets, and even statecharts are interpreted as the set of objects in that state. Constraint diagrams enhance the arrow notation to describe static system invariants which cannot be described by UML class-object diagrams. Reasoning rules are developed for the notation and strong completeness results are given. Finally, 3D diagrams show how the third dimension and VRML modelling can be used for a conceptual modelling of dynamic system behaviour. Much of the tutorial is based on a case study developed in industry, illustrating how the new notations are combined with those of UML, including OCL.