Synthesizing executable models of object oriented architectures

The United States Department of Defense (DoD) has mandated the development of Command, Control, Communications Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) Architectures to support the acquisition of systems that are interoperable and will meet the needs of military coalitions. This paper provides a general description of an architecting process based on the object oriented Unified Modeling Language (UML) that includes three phases: analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. It then provides a rationale for style constraints on the use of UML artifacts for representing DoD C4ISR architectures. Finally the paper describes both a mapping between the UML artifacts and an executable model based on Colored Petri nets that can be used for logical, behavioral, and performance evaluation of the architecture. A procedure for the conversion is also provided.