Modeling Organizational Architectural Styles In UML: The Tropos Case

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Modeling Organizational Architectural Styles In
UML The Tropos Case

• Carla Silva Jaelson Castro
• Centro de Informática - Universidade Federal de
  Pernambuco
• jbc_at_cin.ufpe.br

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Outline

• Motivation
• The Tropos Framework
• Organizational Architectural Styles
• Architectural Representation in UML
• Organizational Architectural Styles In UML
• Joint Venture Architectural Style in UML
• Benefits
• Related work
• Future work

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Motivation

• Problem
• Stakeholders are demanding more flexible and
  complex systems
• Classical architectural styles and the styles for
  e-business applications
• Solution
• Tropos has defined organizational architectural
  styles

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Motivation

• Problem
• Tropos relies on the i notation to describe
  organizational architectural styles
• Solution
• UML has been used to represent the architecture
  of simple and complex systems

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Our Proposal

• An extension of UML to accommodate the concepts
  and features used for representing organizational
  architectures into Tropos.

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The Tropos Framework

• Inspired on organizational concepts, which
  reduces as much as possible the impedance
  mismatch between the system and its environment
• Founded on concepts used to model early
  requirements
• Complements proposals for agent-oriented
  programming platforms.

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The Tropos Framework

• Supports five phases of software development
• Early requirements
• Late requirements
• Architectural design
• Detailed design
• Implementation

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The Tropos Framework

• Adopts the concepts offered by i modeling
  framework to support the initial phases
• Actor (agents, positions or roles)
• Dependency (depender?dependum?dependee)
• Dependum (goal, softgoal, task and resource)

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Organizational Architectural Styles

• To guide the architectural design, Tropos has
  defined organizational architectural styles
• Pyramid
• Joint venture
• Structure in 5
• Takeover
• Arms length
• Vertical integration
• Co-optation, bidding

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Joint Venture Architectural Style
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Architectural Representation in UML

• The UML for Real-Time systems is using UML as an
  architectural modeling language.
• UMLRT concepts
• Capsule
• Port
• Protocol
• Connector

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Organizational Architectural Styles In UML

• An actor in Tropos is mapped to a capsule in
  UML-RT
• A dependum is mapped to a protocol and the roles
  of depender and dependee are mapped to protocol
  roles that are comprised by the protocol

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Organizational Architectural Styles In UML

• Goal type will be mapped to an attribute with
  boolean type present into the port that realizes
  the protocolRole dependee.

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Organizational Architectural Styles In UML

• Softgoal type is mapped to an attribute with
  enumerated type present into the port that
  realizes the protocolRole dependee.

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Organizational Architectural Styles In UML

• Resource type is mapped to the return type of an
  abstract method placed on protocolRole dependee
  that will be realized by a port of a capsule

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Organizational Architectural Styles In UML

• Task type is mapped to an abstract method placed
  on protocolRole dependee that will be realized by
  a port of a capsule

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Organizational Architectural Styles In UML

• The collaboration diagrams describes the internal
  decomposition of a capsule
• The port playing the depender role is indicated
  by a white-filled (versus black-filled for the
  dependee role) square.
• A dependency (depender?dependum?dependee) in
  Tropos is mapped to a connector in UML-RT
• The four types of dependums (Goal, Softgoal, Task
  and Resource) are mapped to four types of
  protocols

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Joint Venture Architectural Style In UML
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Joint Venture Architectural Style In UML
The protocol Authority Delegation assures that
this goal will be fulfilled by using the signals
described in the protocolRole dependee.
The protocol Added Value assures that this
softgoal will be satisfied in some extent by
using the signals described in the protocolRole
dependee.
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Joint Venture Architectural Style In UML
The protocol Coordination assures that this task
will be performed by using the signals described
in the protocolRole dependee.
The protocol Resource Exchange assures that this
resource will be provided by using the signal
described as ltltincominggtgt signal in the
protocolRole dependee.
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Benefits of our approach

• Using organizational architectural styles in UML
  allow us for representing
• the organizational architectural styles into a
  mainstream industrial notation
• detailed information such as the communication
  signals exchanged by the architectural components
• Further advantages in using UML also for modeling
  architecture in Tropos
• Unified Way of Cross-Referencing Model Information

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Related Work

• Parunak and Odell -- Agents 2001 Conference
• Representing Social Structures in UML

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Future Works

• Creating a catalogue for organizational
  architectures in UML
• Extending UML for representing social patterns
  involving agents
• Extending UML for representing agents itself, in
  the context of Tropos methodology.
• Applying our proposal to real projects.