Antonio Cicchetti, Davide Di Ruscio, Alfonso Pierantonio. Managing Dependent Changes in Coupled Evolution. In Theory and Practice of Model Transformations. Volume 5563 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, 2009. [doi]
In Model-Driven Engineering models and metamodels are not preserved from the evolutionary pressure which inevitably affects almost any artefacts. Moreover, the coupling between models and metamodels implies that when a metamodel undergoes a modification, the conforming models require to be accordingly co-adapted. One of the main obstacles to the complete automation of the adaptation process is represented by the dependencies which occur among the different kinds of modifications. The paper illustrates a dependency analysis, classifies such dependencies, and proposes a metamodeling language driven resolution which is independent from the evolving metamodel and its underlying semantics. The resolution enables a decomposition and consequent scheduling of the adaptation steps allowing the full automation of the process.