Design of Fractal-Based Systems within MDA: Platform Independent Modelling

Abstract

Today’s businesses must continuously adapt to changing external environment in accelerated time frames. This requires businesses to decrease costs and time of the very process of change. Therefore, the potentials of changes in software caused by changes in businesses must be addressed during the software modelling. This can be accomplished with a fractal-based architecture. The main properties of fractal-based systems are self-similarity, self-organization, goal- orientation, dynamics, and vitality. This paper discusses how fractal-based nature of the system can be analyzed and modelled in the context of the object-oriented paradigm from the platform-independent viewpoint proposed by Model Driven Architecture (MDA). The main objective of MDA is to make software designs easily portable between different operating platforms, keeping interoperability of the software and reusability of the designs. The suggested approach helps in discovering behavioural and structural scale invariants of fractal-based systems. All scale invariants that must be implemented in fractals are separated in distinct fractal interfaces and fractal classes.