11.1 Introduction

The UML is particularly adept at clearly showing architectures, system structures, and behavior all vital aspects of any C⁴ISR-compliant product. Besides being useful and appropriate for creating C⁴ISR products, the UML has a number of other significant advantages for architectural description. First, it is a widely used standard that is taught in many universities. There are over a hundred books available about the UML, and there are easily over a dozen different commercial tools available. The UML is in widespread use by systems and software engineers in the real-time and embedded domain. The UML can be used all the way through the development process, from specifying the operational architecture (via C⁴ISR products) to systems engineering and software development they can all use the same language for specification and design. This minimizes confusion and error-prone translation among discipline-specific languages.