A Formal Definition of Model Composition Traceability
This work addresses the tedious and error-prone nature of model composition for developers in model-driven development, though it appears incremental as it formalizes and extends prior traceability methods.
The paper tackles the problem of managing complexity in model composition within multi-modeling approaches by proposing a formal definition of model composition traceability, building on previous work to provide a generic traceability approach.
In a multi-modeling based approach, the system under development is described by several models that represent various perspectives and concerns. Obviously, these partial representations are less complex than the global model, but they need to be composed to address validation and synchronization tasks. The model composition is a crucial model driven development operation, but it remains a tedious and error prone activity. In this perspective, a traceability mechanism offers a way to master this complexity by providing support to comprehend the composition effects. In previous work, we presented a traceability approach dedicated to this operation. The current takes advantages of these experiments, and proposes a formalization of the model composition traceability. Also, an overview of a generic traceability approach is provided. The latter relies on the formal definition we introduce for the model composition operation and the related traces.