BOM2UML: Integrating BOM Specifications into UML-based Development Environments Daniele Gianni, Andrea D’Ambrogio and Marco Grasso Department of Enterprise Engineering University of Rome TorVergata Rome (Italy) ABSTRACT. Base Object Model (BOM) is a standard to define conceptual models that can be reused for the development or the extension of simulation systems based on the IEEE High Level Architecture (HLA). However, BOM specifications suffer from interoperability issues as they cannot be automatically imported into model-driven simulation engineering environments based on UML and related standards. In this paper, we overcome this limitation by introducing BOM2UML, a model transformation to derive standard UML models from a BOM specification. We provide both a conceptual description of the transformation rules and the details of their implementation in ATL, the Atlas Transformation Language. We also show a preliminary output of the proposed transformation, applied to a set of BOM specifications of a simplified military application. Keywords: HLA, BOM, UML, Model-driven Development, Model Transformation 1. INTRODUCTION Modern simulation software often needs to scale up the increasingly computational and design complexity to effectively support modern systems engineering. Distributed simulation gives means to cope with the increased computational complexity, exploiting the computational capabilities of several interconnected hosts [1]. However, distributed simulation further exacerbates the design complexity for the inherent parallelism, interoperability and communication issues introduced. The IEEE High Level Architecture (HLA) standard has been introduced to mitigate the impact of these issues. In particular, HLA specifies sets of compliance rules [2], interfaces for general distributed simulation services [3], an Object Model Template (OMT) for data interchange [4], and a Federation Execution and Development Process (FEDEP) [5][6]. For these characteristics, HLA has successfully contributed to the reuse of the generic software infrastructure for the simulator synchronization and communication. In addition, HLA has also promoted the reuse of individual simulators (named federates in HLA terminology). However, HLA does not maximize the degree of software components reuse as it only supports coarse reuse of individual simulators [7], mainly addressing data exchange in the form of OMT Class/attributes and Interaction. The Class/attributes represent permanent entities which interest can be subscribed by none, one or more federates in a HLA simulation. The attributes are updated by the owner simulator, which is unaware of the subscribing simulators. Differently, Interactions are temporary entities that can be sent to a specific and known type of recipient. To overcome these limitations, SISO has introduced the Base Object Model (BOM) specification, which provides means for the full documentation of simulation components [8]. In particular, BOMs enable the documentation of components’ static and dynamic aspects, maintaining compliance with HLA and contributing to promote components reuse. Despite of this, BOMs are formulated using textual tables and an ad-hoc Data Interchange Format (DIF) based on XML. To cope with the increasingly design complexity, it becomes essential to integrate BOM specifications within model-driven simulation engineering approaches based on UML [9]. This integration can contribute to exploit the BOM advantages while leveraging on the wide availability of model-driven development tools compliant with UML. In particular, the ability to provide a UML representation of BOMs contributes to solve most of the technical and economical interoperability challenges introduced by the development of simulation software through integration of interoperable simulators. From a technical perspective, UML is a constituting part of the OMG Model Driven Architecture (MDA) [10], a set of standards (e.g. MOF [11], XMI [12]) for model interoperability. From an economical perspective, the use of UML contributes to eliminate considerable investments to retrofit existing tool for BOM interoperability [9]. In this paper, we present a first attempt to achieve the above integration, introducing BOM2UML, a set of transformations to derive UML diagrams from BOM specifications. The transformation is based on a conceptual mapping between elements of BOM definitions and elements of UML metamodel. The transformation is implemented using ATL [13], a Model-Driven Architecture technology, and it can therefore be executed using standard tools such Eclipse [14]. The transformation output is in the