Managing Model Adaptation by Precise Detection of Metamodel Changes

Kelly Garcés (1, 2, 3) , Frédéric Jouault (1) , Pierre Cointe (2, 3) , Jean Bézivin (1, 3)

1 ATLANMOD - Modeling Technologies for Software Production, Operation, and Evolution
2 ASCOLA - Aspect and composition languages
3 LINA - Laboratoire d'Informatique de Nantes Atlantique

Technological and business changes influence the evolution of software systems. When this happens, the software artifacts may need to be adapted to the changes. This need is rapidly increasing in systems built using the Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) paradigm. An MDE system basically consists of metamodels, terminal models, and transformations. The evolution of a metamodel may render its related terminal models and transformations invalid. This paper proposes a three-step solution that automatically adapts terminal models to their evolving metamodels. The first step computes the equivalences and (simple and complex) changes between a given metamodel, and a former version of the same metamodel. The second step translates the equivalences and differences into an adaptation transformation. This transformation can then be executed in a third step to adapt to the new version any terminal model conforming to the former version. We validate our ideas by implementing a prototype based on the AtlanMod Model Management Architecture (AMMA) platform. We present the accuracy and performance that the prototype delivers on two concrete examples: a Petri Net metamodel from the research literature, and the Netbeans Java metamodel.

Mots clés: Model-Driven Engineering; Model Transformation; Adaptation

Domaines: Informatique et langage [cs.CL]

Kelly Garcés, Frédéric Jouault, Pierre Cointe, Jean Bézivin. Managing Model Adaptation by Precise Detection of Metamodel Changes. In Proc. of ECMDA 2009, Jun 2009, Enschede,, Netherlands. pp.34-49, ⟨10.1007/978-3-642-02674-4⟩. ⟨hal-00466940⟩