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The Unified Modeling Language has become an alternative to traditional modeling languages such as data flow diagrams for use in systems analysis. A modeling language is used to represent an information system so that analysts can use the model to make decisions about the design of the system and to communicate with stakeholders about the system. This study examines the comparative effectiveness of the UML and traditional modeling languages in communicating information about a system design. The study examines this on three types of individuals: individuals with no knowledge of either modeling language, individuals with no knowledge of either language that were provided training in one of the languages, and individuals that have had more extensive training in one of the languages. The study finds that there is no difference in the ability to communicate system design information between the languages for the first two types of individuals. However, the study finds that, for more extensively trained individuals, systems modeled with the UML are better able to communicate information about the data in the system while systems modeled with traditional languages are better able to communicate information about the process used by the system.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the relationships between process modeling and Industry 4.0, the strategic themes and the most used process modeling language in smart factories. The study also presents the growth of the field of study worldwide, the perspectives, main challenges, trends and suggestions for future works.

To do this, a science mapping was performed using the software SciMAT, supported by VOS viewer.

The results show that the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), Unified Modelling Language (UML) and Petri Net are the most relevant languages to smart manufacturing. The authors also highlighted the need to develop new languages or extensions capable of representing the dynamism, interoperability and multiple technologies of smart factories.

It was possible to identify the most used process modeling languages in smart environments and understand how these languages assist control and manage smart processes. Besides, the authors highlighted challenges, new perspectives and the need for future works in the field.

The definition of modeling languages is a key‐prerequisite for model‐driven engineering. In this respect, Domain‐Specific Modeling Languages (DSMLs) defined from scratch in terms of metamodels and the extension of Unified Modeling Language (UML) by profiles are the proposed options. For interoperability reasons, however, the need arises to bridge modeling languages originally defined as DSMLs to UML. Therefore, the paper aims to propose a semi‐automatic approach for bridging DSMLs and UML by employing model‐driven techniques.

The paper discusses problems of the ad hoc integration of DSMLs and UML and from this discussion a systematic and semi‐automatic integration approach consisting of two phases is derived. In the first phase, the correspondences between the modeling concepts of the DSML and UML are defined manually. In the second phase, these correspondences are used for automatically producing UML profiles to represent the domain‐specific modeling concepts in UML and model transformations for transforming DSML models to UML models and vice versa. The paper presents the ideas within a case study for bridging ComputerAssociate's DSML of the AllFusion Gen CASE tool with IBM's Rational Software Modeler for UML.

The ad hoc definition of UML profiles and model transformations for achieving interoperability is typically a tedious and error‐prone task. By employing a semi‐automatic approach one gains several advantages. First, the integrator only has to deal with the correspondences between the DSML and UML on a conceptual level. Second, all repetitive integration tasks are automated by using model transformations. Third, well‐defined guidelines support the systematic and comprehensible integration.

The paper focuses on the integrating direction DSMLs to UML, but not on how to derive a DSML defined in terms of a metamodel from a UML profile.

Although, DSMLs defined as metamodels and UML profiles are frequently applied in practice, only few attempts have been made to provide interoperability between these two worlds. The contribution of this paper is to integrate the so far competing worlds of DSMLs and UML by proposing a semi‐automatic approach, which allows exchanging models between these two worlds without loss of information.

In the last decade, web services have become a major technology to implement loosely coupled business processes and perform application integration. Through the use of context, a new generation of web services, namely context‐aware web services (CASs), is currently emerging as an important technology for building innovative context‐aware applications. Unfortunately, CASs are still difficult to build. Issues like lack of context provisioning management approach and lack of generic approach for formalizing the development process need to be solved in the first place for easy and effective development of CASs. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the techniques on developing CASs.

The paper focuses on introducing a model‐driven platform, called ContextServ, and showcasing how to use this platform to rapidly develop a context‐aware web application, Smart Adelaide Guide. ContextServ adopts a model‐driven development (MDD) approach where a Unified Modeling Language (UML)‐based modeling language – ContextUML – is used to model web services and its context‐awareness features.

The paper presents novel techniques for efficient and effective development of CASs using a MDD approach. The ContextServ platform is the only one that provides a comprehensive software toolset that supports graphical modeling and automatic model transformation of CASs.

The proposed approach has been validated in practice by developing various CASs. The experimental study demonstrates the efficiency and effectiveness of the approach.

The paper presents a novel platform called ContextServ, which offers a set of visual editing and automation tools for easy and fast generating and deploying CASs.

The development of context-aware applications in ubiquitous environments depends not only on the user interactions but also on several context parameters. The handling of these parameters is a fundamental problem in these systems. The key purpose of this work is to enrich the unified modeling language (UML) class diagram with new constructs to provide a universal model capable of coping with the context-awareness concerns.

The authors provide a review of existing context handling approaches. Afterward, they relied on the UML extensibility mechanisms to propose a heavyweight extension for the UML class diagram. This generic approach allows describing the different context parameters since the modeling phase.

Existing solutions for context handling apply the contextual constraints on finished applications or tend to be dependent on a specific development process. This paper presents a solution based on UML, which allows dealing with context since the modeling phase, and independently of development processes. This proposal is implemented as an eclipse editor and illustrated through a case study in the healthcare field.

This paper addresses the problem of context handling, and it presents a review of the foremost existing solutions. The paper also presents a heavyweight extension for the UML class diagram, which consists in enriching it with additional constructs, capable of monitoring how applications are linked to context parameters and how the values of these parameters may affect the application behavior.

The lack of reference architecture for Internet of Things (IoT) modeling impedes the successful design and implementation of an IoT-based production logistics and supply chain system (PLSCS). The authors present this study in two parts to address this research issue. Part A proposes a unified IoT modeling framework to model the dynamics of distributed IoT processes, IoT devices, and IoT objects. The models of the framework can be leveraged to support the implementation architecture of an IoT-based PLSCS. The second part (Part B) of this study extends the discussion of implementation architecture proposed in Part A. Part B presents an IoT-based cyber-physical system framework and evaluates its performance. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This paper adopts a design research approach, using ontology, process analysis, and Petri net modeling scheme to support IoT system modeling.

The proposed IoT system-modeling approach reduces the complexity of system development and increases system portability for IoT-based PLSCS. The IoT design models generated from the modeling can also be transformed to implementation logic.

The proposed IoT system-modeling framework and the implementation architecture can be used to develop an IoT-based PLSCS in the real industrial setting. The proposed modeling methods can be applied to many discrete manufacturing industries.

The IoT modeling framework developed in this study is the first in this field which decomposes IoT system design into ontology-, process-, and object-modeling layers. A novel implementation architecture also proposed to transform above IoT system design models into implementation logic. The developed prototype system can track product and different parts of the same product along a manufacturing supply chain.

This paper reviews existing business process (BP) modeling languages that are widely used in the industry as well as recent research work on modeling and analysis of BPs in the service-oriented environment and Internetware-based software paradigm. BPs in such environment are different from traditional BPs due to loose coupling of partner services, dynamic and on-the-fly selection of partners and run-time process adaptability. The unique characteristics of these BPs require formal modeling of the requirements and constraints in each phase of their life cycle, including design phase, implementation and deployment phase and execution phase.

The paper first provides a categorization of typical user requirements in each phase of the BP life cycle. Then a detailed comparison of the selected languages with respect to their requirement modeling and analysis capabilities in each of the identified categories is provided. The paper also discusses new requirements engineering research challenges arising from future software needs and emerging trends in software engineering in the context of Web-services-based BPs and Internetware.

There is a need to have a framework that provides support for user requirements modeling and analysis for all the phases of BP life cycle in an integrated manner. Such a framework would be useful not only in resolving the inconsistencies between requirements across phases but also in addressing the issues related to BP evolution due to changes in user requirements over time. Moreover, with the Internet of things (IoT) adoption in BPM, there is a need to have an integrated environment that provides support for capturing the resilience requirements of enterprise BPs as well as the mobility constraints of the underlying IoT devices.

This paper reviews existing BP modeling languages and frameworks and discusses the new requirements engineering research challenges arising from future software needs and the emerging trends in BP management in the service-oriented environment and Internetware-based software paradigm.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the application of UML extensions on the elicitation of the knowledge that is intrinsic to the business processes of electronic government that will be available on digital TV.

Based on the understanding that: knowledge of e‐government is inherent in the applications available to the citizen; these applications aggregate content and services; and business processes result in products or services that are available for the citizen, this study seeks to, through the use of diagrams proposed by Eriksson and Penker, elicit the knowledge intrinsic to business processes, facilitating the development of applications destined to digital TV.

The proposed model facilitates the understanding of business processes and the identification of opportunities for improvement. The application of the BP diagram has enabled the authors to obtain an overview of all elements participating in the process as well as detail the relationship between them in a single diagram to facilitate the understanding of the process as a whole and assist its implementation. The assembly line diagram not only highlighted the interaction between business processes and information objects read and written in the assembly line, but also aided the identification of use cases that support the actors of the system and, consequently, the preparation of the t‐Government application requirements. The activity diagram provided highlights of how the activities that comprise the processes interact among each other and what flow of action is necessary to achieve the goal of the business process.

It is worth mentioning that what is being dealt with here is t‐Government applications accessible via iDTV (a fixed device). It is also understood that such applications are not tied to a specific TV program, since they are treated as resident applications; that is, citizens download them from an STB TV Channel and can interact with them whenever they want, regardless of the program that is being aired at the moment.

The use of unified modeling language (UML) extensions as a technique for knowledge modeling is a domain still little explored in literature. Although UML was originally designed to assist in systems modeling, its application has been extended to business and knowledge modeling.

Ubiquitous web applications (UWA) are a new type of web applications which are accessed in various contexts, i.e. through different devices, by users with various interests, at anytime from anyplace around the globe. For such full‐fledged, complex software systems, a methodologically sound engineering approach in terms of model‐driven engineering (MDE) is crucial. Several modeling approaches have already been proposed that capture the ubiquitous nature of web applications, each of them having different origins, pursuing different goals and providing a pantheon of concepts. This paper aims to give an in‐depth comparison of seven modeling approaches supporting the development of UWAs.

This methodology is conducted by applying a detailed set of evaluation criteria and by demonstrating its applicability on basis of an exemplary tourism web application. In particular, five commonly found ubiquitous scenarios are investigated, thus providing initial insight into the modeling concepts of each approach as well as to facilitate their comparability.

The results gained indicate that many modeling approaches lack a proper MDE foundation in terms of meta‐models and tool support. The proposed modeling mechanisms for ubiquity are often limited, since they neither cover all relevant context factors in an explicit, self‐contained, and extensible way, nor allow for a wide spectrum of extensible adaptation operations. The provided modeling concepts frequently do not allow dealing with all different parts of a web application in terms of its content, hypertext, and presentation levels as well as their structural and behavioral features. Finally, current modeling approaches do not reflect the crosscutting nature of ubiquity but rather intermingle context and adaptation issues with the core parts of a web application, thus hampering maintainability and extensibility.

Different from other surveys in the area of modeling web applications, this paper specifically considers modeling concepts for their ubiquitous nature, together with an investigation of available support for MDD in a comprehensive way, using a well‐defined as well as fine‐grained catalogue of more than 30 evaluation criteria.

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) has received significant attention as the tool of the future for modeling information systems. However, prior to the development of the UML, IS modeling was done with tools such as Data Flow Diagrams (DFDs) and Entity‐Relationship Diagrams (ERDs). These tools have been developed over many years of information systems development and taught to thousands of information systems professionals. Many organizations continue to use these tools, and many other organizations use these tools but are considering switching to the UML. While the UML is being promoted as the future of IS modeling, there is little empirical evidence that suggests it is a better tool than the traditional approach. This research seeks to inform the decision to adopt the UML over traditional modeling tools by examining the efficacy of the two modeling tools in the identification of design defects in an information system model. The study involved MIS students attempting to find defects embedded in a model of an information system. The study finds that students using UML were able to find approximately twice as many of the defects injected in the model as those using traditional modeling tools.