Development of Modelling Frameworks and Viewpoints with Kitalpha

Abstract

A common need in system, software, and hardware engineering is to describe system architectures, especially in demanding domains such as aeronautics, defence or telecommunications. Kitalpha is an environment to develop and execute MBE (Model-Based Engineering) workbenches for description of system architecture. Kitalpha uses the DSL technique in order to develop such development environments accurately, quickly, and safely. This paper presents the main features of Kitalpha and lessons learned from a DSL-based development.

Instant distribution of consistency-relevant change information in a hierarchical multi-developer engineering environment

“…Managing consistency in such an environment is a major factor in these works. EMF Views [10] Kitalpha, [58], Model Join [12] and Viatra [20] are similar to our own work in this regard. However, only Viatra recomputes consistency information in an incremental way.…”

“…Similar to the one presented in this paper, other works discuss the type structure of their underlying artifact basis (in the sense, whether meta-models can be unified within a single view), the management of consistency at run-time, and the the possibilities to manipulate the artifact basis. Most notably EMF Views [10] Kitalpha, [58], Model Join [12] and Viatra [20] share similarity with our work, since they all consider multiple meta-models (or engineering artifact types) within a single view, while giving the possibility to augment the model-respectively artifact-basis with enhancing information. Out of these approaches, only Viatra considers an incremental re-computation of consistency as our work does.…”

Ensuring safe and consistent coengineering of cyber‐physical production systems: A case study

“…Managing consistency in such an environment is a major factor in these works. EMF Views,34 Kitalpha,35 Model Join,36 and Viatra37 are similar to our own work in this regard. However, only Viatra recomputes consistency information in an incremental way.…”

Scalable model views over heterogeneous modeling technologies and resources

“…However, at the time of writing, it does not fully support a variety of modeling technologies and related model persistence backends other than EMF-based ones. The same is also true for the Sirius framework [43], as well as for the Kitalpha framework [34] that relies on Sirius, whose final objective is to facilitate the creation of modeling workbenches proposing different kinds of views. They are both directly built upon Eclipse/EMF and do not natively aim at integrating other modeling technologies and related resources (even if customer-specific extensions could be developed in a case-by-case manner).…”