Specification and Refinement of Soft Real-Time Requirements Using Sequence Diagrams

Soft real-time requirements are often related to communication in distributed systems. Therefore it is interesting to understand how UML sequence diagrams can be used to specify such requirements. We propose a way of integrating soft real-time requirements in sequence diagram specifications by adding probabilities to timed sequence diagrams. Our approach builds on timed STAIRS, which is an approach to the compositional and incremental development of sequence diagrams supporting specification of mandatory as well as potential behavior.