A TRANSFORMATION APPROACH FOR COLLABORATION BASED REQUIREMENT MODELS

Distributed software engineering is widely recognized as a complex task. Among the inherent complexitiesis the process of obtaining a system design from its global requirement specification. This paper deals withsuch transformation process and suggests an approach to derive the behavior of a given systemcomponents, in the form of distributed Finite State Machines, from the global system requirements, in theform of an augmented UML Activity Diagrams notation. The process of the suggested approach issummarized in three steps: the definition of the appropriate source Meta-Model (requirements Meta-Model), the definition of the target Design Meta-Model and the definition of the rules to govern thetransformation during the derivation process. The derivation process transforms the global systemrequirements described as UML diagram activities (extended with collaborations) to system rolesbehaviors represented as UML finite state machines. The approach is implemented using AtlasTransformation Language (ATL).