A generic framework for modeling resources with UML

Current wisdom encourages designers to first focus on the logical aspects o f their problem and then defer platform and technology issues until the con cluding phases of development. This behavior is reasonable, considering tha t devising logically sound solutions is frequently the most difficult aspec t of development. Unfortunately-and this has been understated to date-there are many situatio ns in which this approach is inappropriate. Real-time software design is on e domain where this situation is particularly obvious because the domain's requirements force software to interact with the physical world in some way . Recently, a generic object-oriented framework has been proposed for modelin g both physical and logical resources. Although the framework is generic, i t is mainly used with the industry-standard unified modeling language (UML) . By providing a standard means for representing resources and their attrib utes, it becomes possible to seamlessly transfer UML models of real-time sy stems between design and specialized analysis tools. The author shows how developers can use the OMG's UML to model resources an d thus predict crucial system properties before fully implementing a system .