Adding a methodological assistant to a protocol modeling environment

The use of protocol design toolkits based on UML profiles has been hampered by the lack of methodological support. Indeed, those toolkits should include an assistant based on patterns and dedicated to driving the designer step by step through a well defined methodology. Thus, the TURTLE UML profile is extended with widely accepted service and protocol-oriented patterns. These patterns are built upon UML analysis diagrams i.e. use case, interaction overview and sequence diagrams. Moreover, all these patterns and diagrams have a formal semantics. Finally, they have been implemented in TTool, the open-source toolkit supporting TURTLE. The proposed approach remains general and may be applied to various modeling languages and use-case analysis driven processes.