Organizing UML Class Diagrams in Layers

Visual tools are widely used in both hardware and software system design and UML is emerging as a de facto standard in software industries for software design. The layered architectural style is frequently used as the basic architectural model in various software systems. Assuming that a static model of a system is given as a UML class diagram, layers can be proposed on the basis of the relationships in the class diagram. We discuss the rules that could be used in finding proper layer structures, and show that a tool applying these rules can automatically infer layers with reasonable accuracy