A multi-view model-driven approach for packaging software components

Abstract

Tool support in chemical process modeling evolved towards using more complex and more integrated systems, often made by combining smaller sub-systems, coming from different vendors. The increasingly growing heterogeneity of these systems led to the emergence of interoperability standards such as CAPE-OPEN. However, the component-based architecture imposed by this standard made the development and maintenance of process modelling components more complex. Indeed, it requires accurate knowledge about three interconnected domains: the process itself, the standard specification, and the middleware (e.g. COM or .NET). Consequently, both development and maintenance tasks require the collaboration of several experts throughout the entire component lifecycle. Tools that assist experts in performing these tasks are thus required. This paper presents an iterative modeldriven approach that allows expressing changes through three separated views, each of which is associated to an expert domain, and automatically propagating the effects of these changes in order to generate compliant code. The approach is based on domain-specific modeling and model transformations, and is illustrated through a prototype that has been validated with respect to expected changes impacting the three domains.