Merging OMG standards in a general modeling, transformation, and simulation framework

Abstract

Test-driven Agile Simulation (TAS) is a general-purpose approach that combines model-driven engineering, simulation, and testing techniques to improve overall quality for the development process. TAS focuses on the construction of system and test specification models that are conform to the standards provided by the Object Management Group (OMG). Specifically, this approach aims at the detection of design errors by simulating the specified system and executing test cases as soon as possible at an early modeling level. In order to facilitate the development process we propose SimTAny: a versatile framework that enables seamless modeling, simulation, and testing of model specifications. The framework combines appropriate tools and software components within an integrated environment based on service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Eclipse RCP. The TAS approach as well as the SimTAny framework rely on various OMG standards and widely accepted tools. In particular, a combination of the UML and several standardized extension profiles namely SysML, MARTE, and UTP enables the development of high-quality software products based on a standard conform tool chain. The framework provides, among others, a MOFM2T standard conform model-to-text transformation component in order to generate executable simulation code for the simulation engine OMNeT++. In this paper we introduce the main features of the SimTAny framework with a special focus on the utilized OMG standards.