Communiqué: a planning-based sequence diagrams generator

Abstract During the software system development lifecycle, different types of Unified Modeling Language model are developed to represent different views of the system. Sequence diagrams represent one of the most important types of model. They show how objects in the system interact to offer the functionality manifested in the form of use cases. As the complexity of the system being modeled increases, creating the sequence diagrams manually becomes harder. However, the problem of automatic sequence diagrams generation has not caught enough researchers yet. This paper presents an approach and a tool to automatically generate sequence diagrams from use cases and class diagrams. The problem of determining the sequence of message passing is treated as an Artificial Intelligence action planning problem and solved as such. In doing so, Design by Contract concepts are enforced in the specification of the given use cases and class diagrams. A special message-passing planner, Communiqué, was developed and implemented accordingly. The overall approach was empirically evaluated against sets of manually created sequence diagrams available in the literature. Communiqué was able to create sequence diagrams comparable to the manually developed ones. The paper also sheds the light on some directions for future work to advance the applicability of the approach.