Multi-level Modeling for Industrial Automation Systems

A formalisation of deep metamodelling

“…In our formalisation, this is not necessary as the metalevel is implicit in each specification, so that all its elements have the same metalevel. The work in [ADP09] proposes a deep metamodelling framework which extends the basic notion of clabject for handling connector inheritance and instantiation. METADEPTH [dG10,dGCML13] is a deep metamodelling framework which supports potency, double linguistic/ontological typing and linguistic extension.…”

“…Secondly, not all works adhere to strict ontological metamodelling. In [ADP09], the ontological type of an association does not need to be in the adjacent metalevel above, but several metalevels above. Note that our single-potency semantics makes it possible to retain strict metamodelling for associations through a flattening construction that replicates these associations.…”

“…Finally, some works differ in how they tackle potency on constraints and methods. Potency on constraints is not explicitly shown in [AGK09] and not considered in [ADP09], whereas potency on methods is only supported by DeepJava and METADEPTH. Table 7 shows a summary of the particular semantics for deep characterisation implemented by the above mentioned works and compares it with the semantics supported by our formalisation.…”

“…Deep metamodelling was proposed in the seminal works of Atkinson and Kühne [AK02b], and several researchers and tools have subsequently adopted this approach [ADP09,AM09,dG10,dGCML13]. However, there is still a lack of formalisation of the main concepts of deep metamodelling such as deep characterisation through potency, double linguistic/ontological typing and linguistic extension [dG10].…”

Representation and Traversal of Large Clabject Models

“…Multi-level modeling, as an alternative to UML, is able to handle multiple domain meta-levels within a uniform framework [3]. Advantages of such a modeling approach have been shown by several contributions [2,4,5].…”