Viewpoint Co-evolution through Coarse-Grained Changes and Coupled Transformations

Abstract

Abstract. Multi-viewpoint modeling is an effective technique to deal with the ever-growing complexity of large-scale systems. The evolution of multi-viewpoint system specifications is currently accomplished in terms of fine-grained atomic changes. Apart from being a very low-level and cumbersome strategy, it is also quite unnatural to system modelers, who think of model evolution in terms of coarse-grained high-level changes. In order to bridge this gap, we propose an approach to formally express and manipulate viewpoint changes in a high-level fashion, by structuring atomic changes into coarse-grained composite ones. These can also be used to formally define reconciling operations to adapt dependent views, using coupled transformations. We introduce a modeling language based on graph transformations and Maude for expressing both, the coarse-grained changes and the coupled transformations that propagate them to reestablish global consistency. We demonstrate the applicability of the approach by its application in the context of RM-ODP.

Multi-view refactoring of class and activity diagrams using a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm

“…This idea influenced later efforts on model synchronization frameworks in general (Van Der Straeten et al 2004;Van Gorp et al 2003) and in particular bidirectional model transformations (Moha et al 2009;France et al 2003). Other approaches use so-called correspondence rules for synchronizing models in the contexts of RM-ODP and model-driven web engineering (Cicchetti et al 2009;Grundy et al 1998;Wimmer et al 2012). All these approaches have in common that they consider only atomic changes when reconciling models and not refactorings.…”

“…All these approaches have in common that they consider only atomic changes when reconciling models and not refactorings. In previous work (Wimmer et al 2012), we presented coupled transformations to refactor different views altogether by automatically executing the coupled transformations when initial transformations are executed. Another work we are aware of allowing the propagation of more complex changes such as refactorings is (Ráth et al 2009) based on a kind of event/condition/action rules.…”

“…Another approach aiming for generic model refactorings is presented in Wimmer et al (2012) by using a combination of aspect weaving and model typing. Refactorings are developed on a generic metamodel and may be reused for specific metamodels which fulfill the model typing relationship to the generic metamodel.…”

A Generative Approach to Change-Driven Consistency in Multi-View Modeling

“…Some implementations use declarative logical languages [7] or UML in conjunction with QVT-R [20]. Others use coupled transformations that exploit explicit correspondence links [23] to propagate changes to dependent viewpoints. In contrast to our approach, the transformations are defined directly between the view types with viewpoint languages not between metamodels.…”