referring to the type of hardware; e.g., “IBM System z mainframe”.

(possibly virtualized)

Artifacts deployed on a node may either be drawn inside the node or connected to it with an assignment relationship.

instances

realizing

In addition to internal and external behavior elements, a third type of behavior element is defined to denote an event that can occur; for example, to signal a state change.

When modeling the internal behavior, it is often useful to distinguish a process view and a function view on behavior; two elements associated with these views, process and function, are defined. Both elements can be used to aggregate more detailed processes/functions but based on different aggregation criteria. A process represents a workflow consisting of smaller processes/functions executed in a certain order, with one or more clear starting points and leading to some result. It is sometimes described as “customer to customer”, where this customer may also be an internal customer in the case of sub-processes within an organization, or some system in the case of automated processes. The goal of such a process is to “satisfy or delight the customer” [10]. A function aggregates behavior based on required skills, resources, (application) support, etc. Typically, the processes of an organization or system are defined based on the products and services that this organization or system offers, while the functions are often the basis for the assignment of resources to tasks. It is permitted to use aggregation relationships between processes and functions; e.g., a process can aggregate other processes or functions, as can a function.

with the source of the relationship being the outer, containing element.

with the source of the relationship being the outer, containing element.

Nesting for other relationships has no defined meaning but is still allowed.

models