Modelling of Service-Oriented Architectures with UML

Nowadays, service-oriented architectures are becoming gradually more important. The vast diversity of implementation and support platforms for this kind of architectures (such as Web, Grid or even CORBA) increases the complexity of the development process of service-based systems. With the aim of facilitating the development of service oriented solutions, we propose the specification of an architecture centric model driven development method. To achieve this, we study the architectural properties of the SOA paradigm and follow a development approach based on the MDA proposal. MDA proposes a separation of the development process in abstraction levels. This makes MDA suitable to tackle the development of service-oriented systems. This paper describes a UML profile for the PIM-level service-oriented architectural modelling, as well as its corresponding metamodel. PIM (Platform Independent Model) level is chosen because it does not reflect constraints about any specific platform or implementation technology. To exemplify and validate the profile, a case study is presented in which the proposed profile is used.