Towards Variability-Aware Instance Handling for Model Evolution at Runtime

Research output: Contribution to book/Conference proceedings/Anthology/ReportConference contributionContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

Model-driven software development addresses the growing need for individualized software and fast-changing requirements. To support timely changes to the software, adaptive object modeling realizes the domain model of an application as a runtime model represented by a changeable metamodel. Users can change both runtime- and metamodel. This leads, in principle, to a user-driven eternal system at runtime. However, model evolution is non-trivial as it introduces the co-evolution problem, i.e., what happens to the instances of an evolved model? Various approaches to address this problem exist. These approaches have weaknesses, leading to a system that ages with each evolution step. This work introduces a novel approach to cope a priori with the evolution of entity models at runtime. The Eternal Subspace Instance (ESI) approach bypasses the co-evolution problem by defining model instances as a "rich"composite structure capturing not just the current state of an instance. ESI are generated from a model extended with metadata specifying variants and versions. This information is used to interpret each ESI individually, independent of its variant and version. This work defines ESIs and proposes a framework for the resulting heterogeneous but variability-aware instances. We evaluate our approach with a publicly available reference implementation called modicio applied to an example scenario.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2023 49th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications, SEAA 2023
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages183-190
Number of pages8
ISBN (electronic)9798350342352
Publication statusPublished - 2023
Peer-reviewedYes

Publication series

SeriesEuromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA)

Conference

Title49th Euromicro Conference Series on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications
Abbreviated titleSEAA 2023
Conference number49
Duration6 - 8 September 2023
Website
LocationGrand Blue Fafa Resort
CityDurres
CountryAlbania

External IDs

ORCID /0009-0003-6829-4260/work/167217368
ORCID /0000-0003-1537-7815/work/168720069

Keywords

Keywords

  • co-evolution, eternal, metamodeling, user-driven