Using Roles to Characterize Model Families

The development of reusable requirements and design artifacts often requires one to characterize families of problem and solution models. This paper presents a metamodeling approach to characterizing a family of models. A characterization is expressed as a Role Model that consists of roles that can be played by UML model elemets. In this paper we describe how a family of UML static structural diagrams that have the structural properties defined by a pattern can be characterized by a Static Role Model (SRM). The Abstract Factory pattern is used to illustrate how SRMs can be used to specify reusable designs expressed as patterns.