ULF-Ware – An Open Framework for Integrated Tools for ITU-T Languages

Abstract

Model driven engineering is a popular attempt to deal with the complexity of modern software systems. For the telecommunication sector a model driven approach means that you have to handle half a dozen ITU-T modelling languages in a single process to cover all aspects of telecommunication system development. Unfortunately, this is a difficult task, because the ITU-T languages are hard to use together. That is why the ITU-T started the Unified Language Family (ULF) initiative with the goal to unify the ITU-T language definitions and allow an easier alignment and integrated use of these languages. We present a tooling framework for those ULF languages; it is called ULF-ware. Our framework uses metamodelling and a shared use of common language concepts for a tight language integration. Around these language models it incorporates a set of tools to cover the various responsibilities of development environments such as program parsing, model checking, model transformation, and code generation. This paper shows work in progress. We demonstrate our ideas on a tool chain for a subset of SDL. But the overall goal is an open framework that is extendable with other languages, even beyond ULF, and with tools for other software engineering tasks, like model simulation or software deployment.