A transformation approach for collaboration based requirement models

Distributed software engineering is widely recognized as a complex task. Among the inherent complexities is the process of obtaining a system design from its global requirement specification. This paper deals with such transformation process and suggests an approach to derive the behavior of a given system components, in the form of distributed Finite State Machines, from the global system requirements, in the form of an augmented UML Activity Diagrams notation. The process of the suggested approach is summarized in three steps: the definition of the appropriate source Meta-Model (requirements Meta-Model), the definition of the target Design Meta-Model and the definition of the rules to govern the transformation during the derivation process. The derivation process transforms the global system requirements described as UML diagram activities (extended with collaborations) to system roles behaviors represented as UML finite state machines. The approach is implemented using Atlas Transformation Language (ATL).