MARTE: A Profile for RT/E Systems Modeling, Analysis - and Simulation?

As its name promises, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) provides a collection of diagrammatic modeling styles. To the early class/objects and use-case diagrams were almost immediately added state-, activity-, collaboration-, and component diagrams. All these modeling views, required for structural and behavioral representations of systems, were then progressed to further detailed expressivity. Provision for domainspecific specializations was made under the form of (augmented) profiles. Somehow this goal of being rather universal and extendible discarded the possibility of UML to adopt too strict and precise a semantics; as users were generally to define and refine it in their stereotyped profiles anyway. As a result, even the little execution semantics there is in the standard is often not considered in such specializations. We tackled the general issue of defining a broadly expressive Time Model as a sub-profile of the upcoming OMG Profile for Modeling and Analysis of Real-Time Embedded systems (MARTE), currently undergoing finalization at OMG. The goal is to provide a generic timed interpretation, on which timed models of computation and timed simulation semantics could be built inside the UML definition scope, instead of as part of the many external proprietary profiles. The MARTE time library can be used as the basis for the definition of a UML real-time simulator.