UML-BASED DEFINITION OF INTEGRATION MODELS FOR INCREMENTAL DEVELOPMENT PROCESSES IN CHEMICAL ENGINEERING

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Becker, Simon M. | Westfechtel, Bernhard

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science III, Aachen University of Technology, Germany

Abstract: In development processes, multiple tools are used to describe different aspects of the developed product. The resulting information is stored in heterogeneous documents that are technically independent but whose contents are closely related on the semantic level. Thus, if one document is changed, these changes have to be propagated to dependent documents in order to restore mutual consistency. Therefore, there is a need for incremental integration tools, which assist developers in consistency maintenance. Driven by this need, we realized a framework for building incremental integration tools, which is currently being used in the chemical engineering domain. Integration tools are based on models of the related documents and their mutual relationships. These models are defined in the Unified Modelling Language (UML).

Keywords: Incremental integration, model-based transformation, UML

Journal: Journal of Integrated Design & Process Science, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 49-63, 2004