From UML class diagrams to Aspect-Oriented Class Diagrams using graph transformation

Abstract

UML class diagram is an Object-Oriented model used to describe the static view of a system and so it suffers from many limits of Object Oriented Paradigm (OOP) such as the duplication and cross-cutting concern. For this reason, developers and programmers have proposed a new paradigm called Aspect Oriented Paradigm. The Aspect Oriented Modeling has shown its usefulness in the modeling and development of complex systems and also for solving the problems of object-oriented modeling. Graph transformation is one of several studies on the Aspects composition (weaver) aiming to bridge the gap between Object-Oriented models and Aspect Oriented models. In this paper, we propose an approach for Aspects composition. More precisely, we propose to integrate automatically Aspects models in Object Oriented Class diagrams in order to get Aspect Oriented Class diagrams. The approach is based on graph transformation since the input and the output models are graphs. So, we propose two meta-models one for UML class diagrams and another for Aspect Models. Then a graph grammar is proposed to perform the transformation process. ATOM <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sup> tool is used to implement the approach. A case study illustrates the proposed approach.