In: Journal of Visual Languages & Computing 12 (2), pages 183-202. April 2001.
Abstract: Software engineering for distributed systems is a notoriously hard problem. While common approaches for structural modeling like object-oriented analysis and design offer several benefits, their current support for distributed system design is rather limited. The visual notations for structural modeling can be adjusted to the demands of distributed systems. The behavior modeling notations fail w.r.t. the most crucial aspects. Often the domain-specific behavior notations that have been proposed in this context for the UML neither support concurrency as needed nor do they allow to describe scalable behavior. An object-oriented design technique based on UML notations and a special type of high-level Petri-Nets that overcomes these limitations is presented. It is demonstrated how a visual design language can support the crucial aspects for distributed system design as well as how these aspects can be smoothly integrated into a single language with multiple consistent views.
Keywords: visual language, distributed systems, behavior modeling, object orientation, UML..