Managing Model Adaptation by Precise Detection of Metamodel Changes

Abstract

Abstract. Technological and business changes influence the evolution of software systems. When this happens, the software artifacts may need to be adapted to the changes. This need is rapidly increasing in systems built using the Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) paradigm. An MDE system basically consists of metamodels, terminal models, and transformations. The evolution of a metamodel may render its related terminal models and transformations invalid. This paper proposes a three-step solution that automatically adapts terminal models to their evolving metamodels. The first step computes the equivalences and (simple and complex) changes between a given metamodel, and a former version of the same metamodel. The second step translates the equivalences and differences into an adaptation transformation. This transformation can then be executed in a third step to adapt to the new version any terminal model conforming to the former version. We validate our ideas by implementing a prototype based on the AtlanMod Model Management Architecture (AMMA) platform. We present the accuracy and performance that the prototype delivers on two concrete examples: a Petri Net metamodel from the research literature, and the Netbeans Java metamodel.

A Comparison of Model Migration Tools

“…Cicchetti [1] was the first to report a metamodel matching approach, noting that some categories of change cannot be automatically migrated. Garcés et al [7] provide a potentially more expressive approach that allows the matching strategy to be parameterised.…”

“…The first example is an evolution of a Petri net metamodel, previously used in [1,7,21,25] to discuss co-evolution and model migration.…”

“…AtlanMod Matching Language (AML) [7,6] is a model matching tool, which can be used as a metamodel matching migration tool. AML provides heuristics that the user combines to specify a metamodel matching strategy.…”

“…Devising correct matching strategies was difficult, as AML lacks documentation that describes the input, output and effects of each heuristic. Papers describing AML (such as [7,6]) discuss each heuristic, but mostly in a high-level manner. A semantically invalid combination of heuristics can cause a runtime error, while an incorrect combination results in the generation of an incorrect migration transformation.…”

“…Both the original and the evolved versions of the metamodel are required to specify the mapping model with the Ecore2Ecore development tools. Alternatively, the Ecore2Ecore mapping model can be constructed programmatically and without using the original metamodel 7 . Unlike the other tools considered, Ecore2Ecore does not require the original metamodel to be available in the workspace of the metamodel user.…”