Deployment Diagram

A deployment diagram is a kind of class diagram and it is used for specifying, visualizing and documenting embeded systems and also used for managing executable systems through forward and reverse engineering. They are used to model the static deployment view of a system. i.e in UML it models the physical deployment of artifacts and nodes(physical hardware used to deploy the application). The way the software and hardware components and artifacts are deployed within a system can be described by deployment diagram. The elements present in deployment diagram are: Nodes, Components, Artifacts, Links, Dependencies, Associations. Nodes represent the hardware elements of the deployment system. Components describes the requirements for software elements. Artifacts defines physical piece of information. Links are used to connect instances of nodes and objects. To meet the requirements, hardware components should be designed efficiently and in a cost-effective way.