Tools for Presentation and Animation of Dynamic Models in Objectoriented Design.pdf

To ols for Presentation and Animation of Dynamic Mo dels in Ob jectoriented Design Lars Iversen Per Madsen and Kurt Nrmark Department of Computer Science Aalb org University Fredrik Ba jers Vej DK Aalb org Denmark Email fivermadsennormark gcsaucdk Abstract Mo delling the dynamic asp ects of an ob jectoriented design is imp ortant to gain concrete insight into the ways ob jects interact and relate to each other A similar insight may b e obtained from a static mo del but at a more abstract level and in a more indirect way Dynamic mo dels are usually presented via diagrams which basically are graphs where the vertices are ob jects and the edges are messages or relations among ob jects In this pap er we study such diagrams as the basis for to ols in a dynamic mo delling environment We are esp ecially interested in dierent ways to present time in such to ols One particular approach is to present time by time hereby leading to animation of dynamic mo dels By intro ducing designbyanimation to ols we aim at a radical improvement of our presentation and manipulation of ob jects in dynamic mo dels Intro duction Diagrammatic graphbased presentations play an imp ortant role as the do cu mentation of an ob jectoriented mo del This is b ecause of the do cumentation traditions in early phases of a software engineering pro cess and due to fact that graphbased mo dels provide attractive and natural overviews of a set of entities together with their mutual relations Ob jectoriented mo dels come in two dierent avors Static mo dels and dy