Towards the Co-Evolution of Models and Artefacts of Industrial Tools Through External Views

Abstract

Modern software systems comprise multiple models. When these models are changed, interdependent models must be evolved accordingly. Manually managing this co-evolution of models is tedious and error-prone. Moreover, other interdependent artefacts, such as persisted states of industrial software applications, must co-evolve accordingly. Automated consistency preservation allows for efficiently managing the co-evolution of models. However, while state-of-the-art approaches operate delta-based, typical software applications persist changes statebased without conforming to explicit metamodels. Additionally, software applications may persist changes infrequently, even though interdependent models might be concurrently modified. As such, current approaches are insufficient for artefacts of industrial tools. To address these issues, we propose an approach for the co-evolution of models and artefacts of industrial tools by treating these artefacts as external views on the models.

Evaluating Model Differencing for the Consistency Preservation of State-based Views.

“…State-based views are views that, as opposed to delta-based views, do not provide this fine-grained change sequence upon modification but instead only provide the modified view state. This is often the case when using existing tooling for views (Saglam & Kühn 2021). To close this gap, we investigate model differencing to provide these change sequences, thus allowing to leverage delta-based consistency preservation for state-based views.…”

“…These are, for example, views that encapsulate artifacts of existing software applications to bridge between established software applications and processes. These existing applications are often not designed in a model-driven way and thus do not provide the required fine-grained change information when the view is modified (Saglam & Kühn 2021). Furthermore, persistent, non-volatile unique element identifiers cannot either be assumed -due to the existing application or the view type definitionwhich makes identifying which elements of the original state changed significantly more complex.…”