PowerDesigner Models and Diagrams

PowerDesigner provides a wide range of models and diagrams for all your modeling needs.

A requirements model (RQM) helps you analyze any kind of written requirements and to link them with design objects in other models. You can use an RQM to represent any structured document (e.g. functional specification, test plan, business goals, etc.) and import and export hierarchies of requirements as MS Word documents.
- A requirements document view displays a list of written requirements in a hierarchic grid.
- A traceability matrix view displays the links between requirements and objects from other types of models, external files or other requirements.
- A user allocation matrix view displays the links between requirements and the users and groups who will fulfill them.
An enterprise architecture model (EAM) helps you analyze and document your organization and its business functions, along with the applications and systems that support them and the physical architecture on which they are implemented.
- A process map provides a graphical view of your business architecture, and helps you identify your business functions and high-level processes, independent of the people and business units who fulfill them.
- An organization chart provides a graphical view of your organization as a tree structure, and helps you analyze and display the relationships between organization units (divisions, groups, teams, etc), individuals, and roles.
- A business communication diagram provides a graphical view of your organization, and helps you analyze, the relationships, flows, and other connections between business functions, organization units, roles, and sites.
- A city planning diagram provides a graphical view of the big picture of your enterprise architecture, using the metaphor of planning the infrastructure of a city to represent the organization of systems, applications, etc into architectural areas.
- A service-oriented diagram provides a graphical view of your business and application services and the relationships between them, and helps you associate applications and other application layer objects with business services and processes to assist with SOA design.
- An application architecture diagram provides a high-level graphical view of the application architecture, and helps you identify applications, sub-applications, components, databases, services, etc, and their interactions.
- A technology infrastructure diagram provides a high-level graphical view of the physical architecture required to support the application architecture.
A business process model (BPM) helps you identify, describe, and decompose business processes. You can analyze your system at various levels of detail, and focus alternatively on control flow (the sequence of execution) or data flow (the exchange of data). You can use BPEL, BPMN, and many other process languages.
- A business process diagram (or process flow diagram) provides a graphical view of the control flow (the sequence of execution) or data flow (the exchange of data) between processes at any level in your system.
- A process hierarchy diagram (or functional decomposition diagram) provides a graphical view of the functions of a system and helps you decompose them into a tree of sub-processes.
- A process service diagram provides a graphical view of the services, operations, and interfaces available in your system.
A conceptual data model (CDM) helps you analyze the conceptual structure of an information system, to identify the principal entities to be represented, their attributes, and the relationships between them. A CDM is more abstract than a logical (LDM) or physical (PDM) data model.
- A conceptual data diagram provides a graphical view of the conceptual structure of an information system, and helps you identify the principal entities to be represented, their attributes, and the relationships between them.
A logical data model (LDM) helps you analyze the structure of an information system, independent of any specific physical database implementation. An LDM has migrated entity identifiers and is less abstract than a conceptual data model (CDM), but does not allow you to model views, indexes and other elements that are available in the more concrete physical data model (PDM).
- A logical data diagram provides a graphical view of the structure of an information system, and helps you analyze the structure of your data system through entities and relationships, in which primary identifiers migrate along one-to-many relationships to become foreign identifiers, and many-to-many relationships can be replaced by intermediate entities.
A physical data model (PDM) helps you to analyze the tables, views, and other objects in a database, including multidimensional objects necessary for data warehousing. A PDM is more concrete than a conceptual (CDM) or logical (LDM) data model. You can model, reverse-engineer, and generate for all the most popular DBMSs.
- A physical data diagram provides a graphical view of your database structure, and helps you analyze its tables (including their columns, indexes, and triggers), views, and procedures, and the references between them.
- A multidimensional data diagram provides a graphical view of your datamart or data warehouse database, and helps you identify its facts, cubes and dimensions.
An information liquidity model (ILM) provides a global view of the movement of information in your organization. You can analyze and document where your data originates, where it moves to, and how it is transformed on the way, including replications and ETL.
- An information liquidity diagram provides a high-level graphical view of the liquidity of your information, including data sources, replications, and ETL operations.
- A data transformation diagram provides a graphical view of the inputs, outputs, and steps involved in a data transformation task.
- A transformation control flow diagram provides a graphical view of the order in which a series of data transformation tasks is linked together in a control flow.
An object-oriented model (OOM) helps you analyze an information system through use cases, structural and behavioral analyses, and in terms of deployment, using the Unified Modeling Language (UML). You can model, reverse-engineer, and generate for Java, .NET and other languages.
- A use case diagram is a UML diagram that provides a graphical view of the requirements of your system, and helps you identify how users interact with it.
- A class diagram is a UML diagram that provides a graphical view of the classes, interfaces, and packages that compose a system, and the relationships between them.
- An object diagram is a UML diagram that provides a graphical view of the structure of a system through concrete instances of classes (objects), associations (instance links), and dependencies.
- A composite structure diagram is a UML diagram that provides a graphical view of the classes, interfaces, and packages that compose a system, including the ports and parts that describe their internal structures.
- A package diagram is a UML diagram that provides a high-level graphical view of the organization of your application, and helps you identify generalization and dependency links between the packages.
- A sequence diagram is a UML diagram that provides a graphical view of the chronology of the exchange of messages between objects and actors for a use case, the execution of an operation, or an interaction between classes, with an emphasis on their chronology.
- A communication diagram is a UML diagram that provides a graphical view of the interactions between objects for a use case scenario, the execution of an operation, or an interaction between classes, with an emphasis on the system structure.
- An interaction diagram is a UML diagram that provides a high-level graphical view of the control flow of your system as it is decomposed into sequence and other interaction diagrams.
- An activity diagram is a UML diagram that provides a graphical view of a system behavior, and helps you functionally decompose it in order to analyze how it will be implemented.
- A statechart diagram is a UML diagram that provides a graphical view of a State Machine, the public behavior of a classifier (component or class), in the form of the changes over time of the state of the classifier and of the events that permit the transition from one state to another.
- A component diagram is a UML diagram that provides a graphical view of the dependencies and generalizations among software components, including source code components, binary code components, and executable components.
- A deployment diagram is a UML diagram that provides a graphical view of the physical configuration of run-time elements of your system.
An XML model (XSM) helps you analyze an XML Schema Definition (.XSD), Document Type Definition (.DTD) or XML-Data Reduced (.XDR) file. You can model, reverse-engineer, and generate each of these file formats.
- An XML diagram provides a graphical view of the elements that comprise an XML schema definition in a tree format.
A free model (FEM) provides a context-free environment for modeling any kind of objects or systems. It is generally associated with a set of extensions, which allow you to define your own concepts and graphical symbols.
- A free diagram provides a context-free graphical environment for modeling any kind of objects or systems.
A multimodel report (MMR) is a PowerDesigner report that can document any number of models together and show the links between them. To create such a report, you must have at least one model open in the workspace, and you can add additional models at any time.
- A multimodel report (MMR) is a PowerDesigner report that can document any number of models. To create such a report, you must have at least one model open in the workspace, and you can add additional models at any time.