No abstract

Model management is a central activity in Software Engineering. The most challenging aspect of model management is to keep models consistent with each other while they evolve. As a consequence, there has been increasing activity in this area, which has produced a number of approaches to address this synchronization challenge. The majority of these approaches, however, is limited to a binary setting; i.e. the synchronization of exactly two models with each other. A recent Dagstuhl seminar on multidirectional transformations made it clear that there is a need for further investigations in the domain of general multiple model synchronization simply because not every multiary consistency relation can be factored into binary ones. However, with the help of an auxiliary artifact, which provides a global view over all models, multiary synchronization can be achieved by existing binary model synchronization means. In this paper, we propose a novel comprehensive system construction to produce such an artifact using the same underlying base modelling language as the one used to define the models. Our approach is based on the definition of partial commonalities among a set of aligned models. Comprehensive systems can be shown to generalize the underlying categories of graph diagrams and triple graph grammars and can efficiently be implemented in existing tools.

Model management is a central activity in Software Engineering. The most challenging aspect of model management is to keep inter-related models consistent with each other while they evolve. As a consequence, there is a lot of scientific activity in this area, which has produced an extensive body of knowledge, methods, results and tools. The majority of these approaches, however, are limited to binary inter-model relations; i.e. the synchronisation of exactly two models. Yet, not every multi-ary relation can be factored into a family of binary relations. In this paper, we propose and investigate a novel comprehensive system construction, which is able to represent multi-ary relations among multiple models in an integrated manner and thus serves as a formal foundation for artefacts used in consistency management activities involving multiple models. The construction is based on the definition of partial commonalities among a set of models using the same language, which is used to denote the (local) models. The main theoretical results of this paper are proofs of the facts that comprehensive systems are an admissible environment for (i) applying formal means of consistency verification (diagrammatic predicate framework), (ii) performing algebraic graph transformation (weak adhesive HLR category), and (iii) that they generalise the underlying setting of graph diagrams and triple graph grammars.

The Graph Query Language (GraphQL) is a framework for developing Web Services, which works on the domain model level rather than the functions. While the declarative nature of this framework has already attracted the interest of practitioners in both academia and industry, it still lacks integration capabilities. This shortcoming has been recognized in the industry; there exists a first tool creating a federation-a virtual integrated system-on top of instrumented systems. Being relatively new, it suffers from a few practical and conceptual shortcomings, such as consolidation of (conflicting) schemas and identification of multiple types. In this paper, we will analyze the federation challenge and propose a solution utilizing multi-view modeling and domain specific modeling. Our approach is accompanied by a proof-of-concept implementation and provides a model-based presentation of the GraphQL framework.

Design and development of complex software systems usually comprises multiple inter-related models, i.e. abstract representations of certain aspects of the underlying system. The relations between these models induce global consistency conditions which the models collectively must fulfill. At the same time, these models are subject to frequent changes, and as a result, maintaining their global consistency over time becomes an important issue in model management in general and Model-Driven Software Engineering in particular.In this paper, we present a comprehensive feature model providing an overview of the current state of the art of model management. In this feature model, we further identify the central role of model repair as an implementation pattern for (multi-)model evolution.