Application Configuration via UML Instance Specifications

One way to design complex systems is to use a model driven approach. Model Driven Engineering (MDE) promotes the use of models are primary artifact for analysis, design and implementation of a system. In this paper, we focus on component-based models including classes (representing components), hierarchical composition (classes with parts) and instance specifications. Instance specifications describe instances of a system, i.e. provide values for (a subset of) the attributes of class attributes. However, the use of instance specifications without additional tool support is tedious, since several references need to be setup. This paper will show some mechanisms (notably tables) to ease the usability. There are also different ways to organise instance specifications which have advantages and inconveniences. This paper lists them and provide hints in which situation a certain variant could be used. Code generation from models needs to take instance configuration into account, but application configuration via instances is still not fully supported by all tools. We will show how code generated from instance specifications can look like. This code becomes more interesting for adaptive applications that need to change between different configurations at runtime.