Evolution of the UML interactions metamodel

Abstract

UML Interactions represent one of the three different behavior kinds of the UML. In general, they specify the exchange of messages among parts of a system. Although UML Interactions can reside on different level of abstractions, they seem to be sufficiently elaborated for a higher-level of abstraction where they are used for sketching the communication among parts. Its metamodel reveals some fuzziness and imprecision where definitions should be accurate and concise, though. In this paper, we propose improvements to the UML Interactions' metamodel for Message arguments and Loop CombinedFragments that make them more versatile. We will justify the needs for the improvements by precisely showing the shortcomings of the related parts of the metamodel. We demonstrate the expressiveness of the improvements by applying them to examples that current Interactions definition handles awkwardly. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.