Addressing computational viewpoint design

Distributed system design is a highly complicated and non-trivial task. The problem is the characterised by the need to design multi-threaded, multi-processor, and multimedia systems. Design frameworks such as open distributed processing (ODP), the ITU/ISO standard, define a number of viewpoints from which the design of a distributed system should be approached. To use the framework, a design language for each of these viewpoints must be defined. This paper defines a computational viewpoint language based on the Unified Modelling Language (UML) and Component Quality Modelling Language (CQML). The use of this approach to provide the ODP viewpoint languages enables standard UML tools to be used as part of an ODP compliant design process; and in addition, it will potentially enable the use of Meta Object Facility (MOF) based generation tools for constructing tool support for our language.