An Eclipse-based tool framework for software model management

Abstract

Software development involves the use of many models and Eclipse provides an ideal infrastructure for building tools to support the use of models. While there is a large selection of tools available for working with individual models, there is less support for working with collections of models, as for example, when a collection of models from different sources must be merged. We have identified the problem of working with collections of related models in software development as the Software Model Management (SMM) problem -a close cousin of the Model Management problem in the area of metadata management. In the course of building SMM tools to address particular scenarios, we have observed that they share common foundations both at the theoretical and implementation levels. In this paper, we describe the vision and initial development of a framework that implements these common foundations in order to facilitate and accelerate the development of Eclipse-based SMM tools.

Relationship-based change propagation: A case study

“…The algorithm outlined in Section 5 is being implemented on top of our MTTF [11] framework, and we are planning to do additional case studies to understand what other relationships and rules need to be specified to propagate changes as models are being evolved. We also expect to identify domain-specific rules, on the model and the meta-model levels, which would help construct meaningful relationships.…”

“…context Message inv R1: self.interaction.activityN ode−>size() ≤ 1 Clearly, such descriptions land themselves to natural implementations of relationship checking within model management tools, such as our own tool MMTF [11].…”

Global consistency checking of distributed models with TReMer+

“…A complementary part is a project aimed at developing a customizable Eclipse-based platform for model management. An outline of this project is given in [12].…”

Matching and Merging of Variant Feature Specifications

“…An early vision of this project was presented in [1]. Our current direction is to develop appropriate model management operators for the suite of UML notations and to provide a unifying framework for using these operators in a cohesive way [72], [73].…”