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. This 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 and 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.