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From subsets of model elements to submodels

A characterization of submodels and their properties

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Abstract

Model-driven engineering (MDE) generalized the status of models from documentation or model-driven architecture (MDA) modeling steps to full artifacts, members of a so-called structured “model space”. We concentrate here on the submodel relationship which contributes a lot to this structuring effort. Many works and MDE practices resort to this notion and call for its precise characterization, which is the intent of this paper. A typical situation is model management through repositories. We start from the definition of a model as a set of model elements plus a set of dependency constraints that it asserts over these elements. This allows to isolate the notions of closed, covariant and invariant submodels. As a major result, we show that submodel transitivity can be guaranteed thanks to submodel invariance. This formalization offers keys to analyze operations which manipulate submodels. For example, we deeply study the operator which consists in extracting a model from another one, when selecting some subset of its elements. The same can be applied to many other model operations and the last part of the paper is dedicated to a synthesis on related works which could profit from this characterization. More practically, we show how the results were exploited in our Eclipse modeling environment.

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Notes

  1. To simplify, primitive data types are considered as classes, their typing function being approximated by the association between Feature and Class, under the types role. This has no consequence in this paper.

  2. For the sake of simplicity, these systematic reflective constraints will not be listed in the examples.

  3. An updated version of Fig. 14 with same \(m3^{\prime },\,m4^{\prime }\) and \(m4\) submodels but new \(m1,\,m2\) and \(m3\) submodels. Attributes were omitted to simplify the figure.

  4. Name matching of elements is an example used in the present application.

  5. For reasons of space, only the formulation of the UserCall Collaboration is detailed.

  6. In other words, all instances of unneeded meta-classes, meta-attributes or meta-associations are removed from the model fragment.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor for the comments on the paper, specifically for their contribution to its motivation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. LIFL, UMR CNRS 8022, University of Lille, 59655 , Villeneuve d’Ascq Cedex, France

    Bernard Carré, Gilles Vanwormhoudt & Olivier Caron

  2. Institut TELECOM, Villeneuve d’Ascq Cedex, France

    Gilles Vanwormhoudt

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  1. Bernard Carré
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  2. Gilles Vanwormhoudt
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  3. Olivier Caron
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Correspondence to Bernard Carré.

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Communicated by Prof. Robert France.

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Carré, B., Vanwormhoudt, G. & Caron, O. From subsets of model elements to submodels. Softw Syst Model 14, 861–887 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-013-0340-x

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