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2018 Volume 33
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RESEARCH ARTICLE   Open Access    

Communiqué: a planning-based sequence diagrams generator

  • Dhahran 31261

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  • Abstract: During the software system development lifecycle, different types of Unified Modeling Language model are developed to represent different views of the system. Sequence diagrams represent one of the most important types of model. They show how objects in the system interact to offer the functionality manifested in the form of use cases. As the complexity of the system being modeled increases, creating the sequence diagrams manually becomes harder. However, the problem of automatic sequence diagrams generation has not caught enough researchers yet. This paper presents an approach and a tool to automatically generate sequence diagrams from use cases and class diagrams. The problem of determining the sequence of message passing is treated as an Artificial Intelligence action planning problem and solved as such. In doing so, Design by Contract concepts are enforced in the specification of the given use cases and class diagrams. A special message-passing planner, Communiqué, was developed and implemented accordingly. The overall approach was empirically evaluated against sets of manually created sequence diagrams available in the literature. Communiqué was able to create sequence diagrams comparable to the manually developed ones. The paper also sheds the light on some directions for future work to advance the applicability of the approach.
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  • Cite this article

    Moataz Ahmed, Yaser Sulaiman. 2018. Communiqué: a planning-based sequence diagrams generator. The Knowledge Engineering Review 33(1), doi: 10.1017/S0269888918000103
    Moataz Ahmed, Yaser Sulaiman. 2018. Communiqué: a planning-based sequence diagrams generator. The Knowledge Engineering Review 33(1), doi: 10.1017/S0269888918000103
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RESEARCH ARTICLE   Open Access    

Communiqué: a planning-based sequence diagrams generator

  • Dhahran 31261

  • Published online: 23 July 2018
The Knowledge Engineering Review  33,  2018, 33(1)  |  Cite this article

Abstract: Abstract: During the software system development lifecycle, different types of Unified Modeling Language model are developed to represent different views of the system. Sequence diagrams represent one of the most important types of model. They show how objects in the system interact to offer the functionality manifested in the form of use cases. As the complexity of the system being modeled increases, creating the sequence diagrams manually becomes harder. However, the problem of automatic sequence diagrams generation has not caught enough researchers yet. This paper presents an approach and a tool to automatically generate sequence diagrams from use cases and class diagrams. The problem of determining the sequence of message passing is treated as an Artificial Intelligence action planning problem and solved as such. In doing so, Design by Contract concepts are enforced in the specification of the given use cases and class diagrams. A special message-passing planner, Communiqué, was developed and implemented accordingly. The overall approach was empirically evaluated against sets of manually created sequence diagrams available in the literature. Communiqué was able to create sequence diagrams comparable to the manually developed ones. The paper also sheds the light on some directions for future work to advance the applicability of the approach.

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    Acknowledgments

    • The authors would like to acknowledge the support provided by the Deanship of Scientific Research at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM) under Research Grant IN111013. Many thanks are due to the anonymous referees for their detailed and helpful comments.

    • https://github.com/ysulaiman/communique

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    Moataz Ahmed, Yaser Sulaiman. 2018. Communiqué: a planning-based sequence diagrams generator. The Knowledge Engineering Review 33(1), doi: 10.1017/S0269888918000103
    Moataz Ahmed, Yaser Sulaiman. 2018. Communiqué: a planning-based sequence diagrams generator. The Knowledge Engineering Review 33(1), doi: 10.1017/S0269888918000103
    shu

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