A semi-automatic maintenance and co-evolution of OCL constraints with (meta)model evolution

Abstract

Metamodels are core components of modeling languages to dene structural aspects of a business domain. As a complement, OCL constraints are used to specify detailed aspects of the business domain, e.g. more than 750 constraints come with the UML metamodel. As the metamodel evolves, its OCL constraints may need to be co-evolved too. Our systematic analysis shows that semantically dierent resolutions can be applied depending not only on the metamodel changes, but also on the user intent and on the structure of the impacted constraints. In this paper, we rst investigate the syntactical reasons that lead to apply dierent resolutions. We then propose a co-evolution approach that oers alternative resolutions while allowing the user to choose the best applicable one. We evaluated our approach on six case studies of metamodel evolution and their OCL constraints co-evolution. The results show the usefulness of alternative resolutions along with user decision to cope with real co-evolution scenarios. Within our six case studies our approach led to an average of 92% (syntactically) and 93% (semantically) matching co-evolution w.r.t. the user intent.

Supporting Meta-Model-Based Language Evolution and Rapid Prototyping with Automated Grammar Optimization

“…There is a lot of research supporting different aspects of language change and evolution. Existing approaches focus on how diverse artifacts can be co-evolved with evolving meta-models, namely the models that are instances of the meta-models , OCL constraints that are used to specify static semantics of the language (Khelladi et al, 2017, graphical editors of the language (Ruscio et al, 2010;Di Ruscio et al, 2011), and model transformations that consume or produce programs of the language (García et al, 2012). Specifically, the evolution of language instances with evolving meta-models is well supported by research approaches.…”

Untangling spaghetti of evolutions in software histories to identify code and test co-evolutions

“…Co-evolution is a hot topic in software engineering. Multiple approaches addressed co-evolution of various artifacts, such as models [18], [19], [20], [21], [22], [23], [24], [25], constraints [26], [27], [28], [29], [30], model transformations [31], [32], [33], [34], [35], and code [36], [37], [38], [39], [40]. In this section, we present the main related work w.r.t.…”

Converting OCL and CGMES Rules to SHACL in Smart Grids

“…A set of publications regarding UML/OCL approaches has been found. In [4], a group of automation strategies for OCL rules is presented. The meta-model evolution has a significant impact on the OCL rules.…”