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Structural similarity measure between UML class diagrams based on UCG

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Abstract

In software reuse, the reuse of UML class diagram produced in design phase has received more attention due to the important influence on the following developing process. The reuse is based on similarity. The similarity between class diagrams contains semantic and structural aspects. The existing works focus on semantic similarity, while the structural similarity is little paid attention to. The structure of class diagram can be categorized into two aspects: intra-structure and inter-structure. The intra-structure refers to the composition of each class, and the inter-structure is represented as the relationships between classes. So, the structural similarity measure should be carried out from these two aspects. In this paper, we propose to use a graph named UML class graph (UCG) to represent a class diagram for the structural similarity measure. An algorithm based on UCG Maximum Common Subgraph Sequence is proposed for the inter-structure similarity measure, and UCG edit distance is proposed and introduced to the intra-structure similarity measure. The experimental results show that our proposed approach is effective within a domain or across domains.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by National Natural Science Foundation of China (61772269 and 61370075).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Software, Northeastern University, Shenyang, 110819, China

    Zhongchen Yuan

  2. College of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, 211106, China

    Li Yan & Zongmin Ma

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  1. Zhongchen Yuan
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  2. Li Yan
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  3. Zongmin Ma
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Correspondence to Zongmin Ma.

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Yuan, Z., Yan, L. & Ma, Z. Structural similarity measure between UML class diagrams based on UCG. Requirements Eng 25, 213–229 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-019-00317-w

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