Abstractions and Implementations forArchitectural Connections
ICCDS '96 Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Configurable Distributed Systems
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This paper argues for the UML as a means to rigorously specify data models and communications services of industrial data communications standards. Such standards contain among others the syntactic and semantic description of the application data to be exchanged among devices and systems of different vendors. As a consequence of the growing number and complexity of types of application data and their resulting specific communications services, it becomes almost impossible to maintain specification consistency and avoid ambiguities on the basis of informal, textual notations. By means of example, this paper discusses the recently accepted IEC 61850 standard “Communications networks and systems in substations” and its shortcomings due to the lack of formal notations. It is shown how many of these shortcomings can be overcome and additional benefits provided through the use of UML models – models that could ultimately find their way into the normative parts of such standards.