Applying UML/MARTE on industrial projects: challenges, experiences, and guidelines

Modeling and Analysis of Real-Time and Embedded Systems (MARTE) is a Unified Modeling Language (UML) profile, which has been developed to model concepts specific to Real-Time and Embedded Systems (RTES). In the last 5 years, we have applied UML/MARTE to three distinct industrial problems in three industry sectors: architecture modeling and configuration of large-scale and highly configurable integrated control systems, model-based robustness testing of communication-intensive systems, and model-based environment simulator generation of large-scale RTES for testing. In this paper, we report on our experience of solving these problems by applying UML/MARTE on four industrial case studies. We highlight the challenges we faced with respect to the industrial adoption of MARTE. Based on our combined experience, we derive a framework to guide practitioners for future applications of UML/MARTE in an industrial context. The framework provides a set of detailed guidelines that help reduce the gap between the modeling notations and real-world industrial application needs.