Using UML-F to enhance framework development: A case study in the local search heuristics domain

Currently frameworks are most commonly represented through design diagrams written in standard object-oriented analysis and design languages. However, these design notations do not provide elements for identifying framework variation points and how their instantiation should be performed. Therefore, in order to create framework instances, users have to rely on extra documentation that is not always available. This paper shows the benefits of an extension to UML that explicitly represents all the information required for framework development and instantiation. The approach is illustrated through a large real-world framework for local search heuristics for combinatorial optimization problems. © 2001 Published by Elsevier Science Inc.