Sander Vermolen, Guido Wachsmuth, Eelco Visser. Reconstructing Complex Metamodel Evolution. Technical Report TUD-SERG-2011-026, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands, August 2011.
Metamodel evolution requires model migration. To correctly migrate models, evolution needs to be made explicit. Manually describing evolution is error-prone and redundant. Metamodel matching offers a solution by automatically detecting evolution, yet detects primitive evolution steps only. In practice, primitive evolution steps are jointly applied to form a complex evolution step, which has the same effect on a metamodel as the sum of its parts, yet generally has a different effect in migration. Detection of complex evolution is therefore needed. In this paper we present an approach to reconstructing complex evolution between two metamodel versions, using a matching result as input. It supports operator dependencies and mixed, overlapping and incorrectly ordered complex operator components. It also supports interference between operators, where the effect of one operator, is partially, or completely hidden from the target metamodel by other operators.