Behavior modeling of object-oriented distributed systems

The object oriented approach has emerged as the dominant perspective of software engineering research. Object oriented models provide a powerful tool for specifying requirements and developing solutions of real world problems. Although a wide variety of constructs have been proposed in the literature for object oriented modeling, there has not been much work on extending these models for distributed applications. The paper identifies the requirements and issues of modeling the behavior of an object oriented distributed system and presents an analysis of the behavior modeling techniques. We propose a unifying framework called hierarchical sequences of events, for distributed behavior modeling. Our approach is to investigate the requirements of distributed applications and enrich existing object oriented models with structural end behavior modeling primitives and constructs for distributed systems. More specifically, we identify new attributes and properties of individual objects and extend the existing event based behavior modeling constructs to accommodate the modeling requirements of distributed systems.