Towards the Co-Evolution of Models and Artefacts of Industrial Tools Through External Views

Modern software systems comprise multiple models. When these models are changed, interdependent models must be evolved accordingly. Manually managing this co-evolution of models is tedious and error-prone. Moreover, other interdependent artefacts, such as persisted states of industrial software applications, must co-evolve accordingly. Automated consistency preservation allows for efficiently managing the co-evolution of models. However, while state-of-the-art approaches operate delta-based, typical software applications persist changes state-based without conforming to explicit metamodels. Additionally, software applications may persist changes infrequently, even though interdependent models might be concurrently modified. As such, current approaches are insufficient for artefacts of industrial tools. To address these issues, we propose an approach for the co-evolution of models and artefacts of industrial tools by treating these artefacts as external views on the models

Finding a Universal Execution Strategy for Model Transformation Networks

When using multiple models to describe a (software) system, one can use a network of model transformations to keep the models consistent after changes. No strategy exists, however, to orchestrate the execution of transformations if the network has an arbitrary topology. In this paper, we analyse how often and in which order transformations need to be executed. We argue why linear execution bounds are too restrictive to be useful in practice and prove that there is no upper bound for the number of necessary executions. To avoid non-termination, we propose a conservative strategy that makes execution failures easier to understand. These insights help developers and users of transformation networks to understand under which circumstances their networks can terminate. Additionally, the proposed strategy helps them to find the cause when a network cannot restore consistency