Co-evolving meta-models and their instance models: A formal approach based on graph transformation

Abstract

Model-driven engineering focuses on models as primary artifacts of the software development process, which means programs are mainly generated by model-to-code transformations. In particular, modeling languages tailored to specific domains promise to increase the productivity of software developers and the quality of generated software. Modeling languages, however, evolve over time and therefore, existing models have to be migrated accordingly. The manual migration of models tends to be tedious and error-prone, therefore tools have been developed to (partly) automate this process. Nevertheless, the migration results may not always be well-defined. In this article, we provide a formal framework for model migration which is independent of specific modeling approaches. We treat modeling languages, formalized by metamodels, as well as models as graphs and consider their co-evolutions as coupled graph transformations. In the same line, we study the conditions under which model migrations are well-defined. Existing solutions to model migration are either handwritten or default solutions that can hardly be customized. Here, we introduce a high-level specification approach, called model migration schemes, that supports automation and customization. Starting from a meta-model evolution rule, a default migration scheme can be automatically deduced and customized.

Metamodel and Constraints Co-evolution: A Semi Automatic Maintenance of OCL Constraints

“…First of all, the metamodel change is fundamental to choose which resolution to apply, similarly as in model co-evolution (e.g. [15,25]). The impacts of a rename property and a push property cannot be xed using the same resolution.…”

“…[15,25]), co-evolution of OCL constraints has received little attention so far. Demuth et al [5,6] proposed an approach for OCL co-evolution based on templates.…”

An Improved Model Facet Method to Support EA Alignment

“…Ongoing works focus on meta-model and tools evolutions. As an example, to solve model co-evolution problems, Mantz et al provided a formal technique based on graph transformation [39] and Florez et al implemented the ASIMOV tool [39], [40].…”

The Pullback-Pushout Approach to Algebraic Graph Transformation

“…Let us also mention that pullbacks are also used in [11] to model the e↵ect of a rule on a graph while the same graph can be subject of other changes caused by the environment, but because of the restriction to injective rules no cloning e↵ect is modeled. Finally, since the pb-po rules are defined as two connected spans, one may expect from this approach to model situations where one span is used for transforming data graphs while the other span can be used for transforming the typing information, just like in [17] where rules, defined as two connected co-spans, are used to model co-evolutions of meta-models and models.…”