Managing Dependent Changes in Coupled Evolution

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]

Abstract

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.