A Systematic Literature Review of UML-based Domain-Specific Modeling Languages for Self-Adaptive Systems

Self-adaptive Systems (SaSs) operate under uncertainty conditions and have intrinsic properties that make their modeling a non-trivial activity. This complexity can be minimized by using Domain-Specific Modeling Languages (DSMLs), which may be created by extending Unified Modeling Language (UML). In face of this, we propose investigating how the UML has been customized to create DSMLs that provide proper support for SaSs modeling. To achieve this, we performed a Systematic Literature Review (SRL) by retrieving studies with snowballing technique, selecting studies according to inclusion and exclusion criteria, and extracting and analyzing data to answer our research questions. As the outcome, we retrieved 786 studies and selected 16 primary studies published between 2005 and 2017. The results reveal that the class diagram has been customized through the profile-based mechanism to provide proper support to analysis and design of context-awareness and self-adaptiveness properties.