Enabling dynamic metamodels through constraint-driven modeling

Abstract

Metamodels are commonly used in Model-Driven Engineering to define available model elements and structures. However, metamodels are likely to change during development for various reasons like requirement changes or evolving domain knowledge. Updating a metamodel typically leads to non-conformance issues with existing models. Hence, evolution strategies must be developed. Additionally, the tool implementation must also be updated to support the evolved metamodel. We propose the use of metamodel-independent tools with unified modeling concepts for working with all kinds of metamodels and models. By applying the Constraint-Driven Modeling approach and generating model constraints from metamodels automatically, we solve the described issues and enable dynamic, evolving metamodels. A prototype implementation has shown the feasibility of the approach and performance tests suggest that it also scales with increasing model sizes.