Using structural decomposition and refinements for deep modeling of software architectures

摘要

Traditional metamodeling in two levels gets to its limits when model elements of a domain should be described as instances of other model elements. For example in architecture description languages, components may be instances of their component types. Although workarounds to model such instance relations between model elements exist, they require many validation constraints and imply a cumbersome interface. To obtain more elegant metamodels, deep modeling seeks ways to represent non-transitive instantiation chains directly. However, existing concepts cannot be applied in some situations we refer as composite instantiation patterns. Further, these concepts make existing technologies for model transformation and analysis obsolete as these languages have to be adapted. In this paper, we present an approach to realize deep modeling through structural decomposition and refinements that can be implemented as a noninvasive extension to EMOF-like meta-metamodels. As a consequence, existing tools need not be adapted and composite instantiation patterns are fully supported. We validate our concept by creating a deep modeling architecture description language based on the Palladio Component Model and demonstrate its advantages by modeling a synthetic web application. We show that existing tools for incremental model analysis can be reused and manifest several orders of speedup for a synthetic example analysis.