Class Diagram Similarity Measurement: A Different Approach

Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a standard modeling language for specifying, documenting, and building software. One of the problems of designing a model using UML is that it takes a relatively long time to create a model form the scratch. Reusing models can help accelerate the software development process. Previous researches related with measuring similarity of class diagrams were focused on textual and structural similarity between models. They structural similarity ignores the specific characteristics of relations resided in a class diagram and its components. Based on these problems, this study proposed a measurement similarity method of UML class diagrams based on their components and relations. The method improves the previous method by introducing various kind of relations in a class diagram as part of the parameters to calculate the similarity. The initial investigation of this paper shows that all parameters could determine the similarity of models.