Fernando Macías

Fernando Macías, Adrian Rutle, Volker Stolz et al.

Within Model-Driven Software Engineering, Domain-Specific Modelling has proven to be a powerful technique to specify systems and systems' behaviour in a formal, yet understandable way. Runtime verification (RV) has been successfully used to verify the correctness of such behaviour. Specifying behaviour requires managing various levels of abstractions, making multilevel modelling (MLM) a suitable approach for this task. In this paper, we present an approach to combine MLM and RV with an example from the domain of distributed real-time systems. The semantics of the specified behaviour as well as the evaluation of correctness properties are given by model transformation rules. This facilitates simulation of the system and checking against real-time temporal logic correctness properties.

Fernando Macías

Modern software engineering deals with demanding problems that yield large and complex software. The area of Model-Driven Software Engineering tackles this issue by using models during the development process, but it does not address some of the communication problems among different stakeholders. Domain-Specific Modelling Languages (DSML) aim at involving domain experts with non-technical profiles in that process. DSMLs define concepts with different levels of abstraction, but traditional modelling does not allow enough flexibility to organise them adequately. Multilevel Modelling (MLM) approaches provide an unbounded number of levels of abstraction, plus other features that perfectly fit DSMLs. Their development can also benefit from Model Transformations (MT), especially when these encode the behaviour of DSMLs. MTs can be exploited by MLM, becoming a precise and reusable definition of behaviour. This thesis presents a MLM and Multilevel MT approach which tackles open issues in the field and compares it with the state of the art through literature review and experiments, providing its formalisation and its implementation in the tool MultEcore, together with case studies.