Calculation and propagation of model changes based on user-level edit operations : a foundation for version and variant management in model-driven engineering

摘要

Model-driven engineering (MDE) has become a widespread approach for developing software in many application domains. Models are primary development documents in MDE and subject to continuous evolution. Models therefore have many versions and variants during system lifetime. Thus, the specification and recognition of changes in models is the key to understand and manage the evolution of a model-based system. However, currently available model versioning tools operate on low-level, sometimes tool-specific model representations which can be considered as an implementation of the abstract syntax graph (ASG) of a model. Moreover, primitive graph edit operations are used to specify model changes. This leads to two serious problems: Firstly, the resulting model differences are hard to understand for normal tool users who are not familiar with the internal, graph-based representation of models and the related types of nodes and edges which are usually defined by a meta-model. Secondly, generic graph operations lead to further problems in change propagation scenarios since they can violate consistency constraints in ASGs. In the worst case, which particularly applies to all kinds of visual models, the synthesized result can no longer be opened in standard visual editors and must be corrected based on the serialized data format (e.g. XML) by using low-level textual editors, which is obviously a tedious task prone to errors.Model differences should therefore be based on edit operations which are understandable for modelers and which preserve elementary consistency constraints in the sense that models remain displayable in visual editors. Edit operations which are offered as editing commands in standard editors or modern refactoring tools are examples of this. The tight integration of editing and versioning tools requires consistent specifications of edit operations; this integration is a largely open problem. The main objective of this thesis is to provide a solution for this problem and to systematically lift model versioning concepts, algorithms and tools to a higher level of abstraction.The central idea is to formally specify the available edit operations for a given type of models as transformation rules using the model transformation language Henshin which is based on graph transformation concepts. These formal specifications are automatically transformed into recognition rules being used by a lifting algorithm which recognizes edit operations in a low-level difference of two model versions. The approach has been implemented and evaluated in a framework which is known as SiLift and which is based on the widely used Eclipse Modeling Project.