Engineering Delta Modeling Languages
This addresses the challenge of applying delta modeling to specific languages, reducing manual effort and heterogeneity in language concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of manually developing heterogeneous delta languages for each base language by presenting a process to automatically derive a delta language from a base language's grammar, illustrated with statecharts.
Delta modeling is a modular, yet flexible approach to capture spatial and temporal variability by explicitly representing the differences between system variants or versions. The conceptual idea of delta modeling is language-independent. But, in order to apply delta modeling for a concrete language, so far, a delta language had to be manually developed on top of the base language leading to a large variety of heterogeneous language concepts. In this paper, we present a process that allows deriving a delta language from the grammar of a given base language. Our approach relies on an automatically generated language extension that can be manually adapted to meet domain-specific needs. We illustrate our approach using delta modeling on a textual variant of statecharts.