A Profile for Integrating Function Blocks into the Unified Modeling Language

Abstract

In this paper we introduce a new profile for Function Block Adapters (FBAs), which are responsible for the connection of Unified Modeling Language (UML) ports and function blocks of non-UML languages. FBAs provide interfaces to ports, to function blocks, and a description of the mapping between these interfaces. Both UML and function block developers can use a special easy-to-use FBA description language to express these interface mappings in a concise manner. Our FBA language offers the important advantage of highlevel descriptions during early phases of the UML development process. This paper proposes a mapping of FBA-semantics to standard UML-semantics. The application of FBAs to function block oriented languages like IEC 61131-3, IEC 61499, or Matlab/Simulink^TM is discussed by using the approach of the Model Driven Architecture