On the role of domain ontologies in the design of domain-specific visual modeling langages

Domain-Specific Visual Modeling Languages should provide notations and abstractions that suitably support problem solving in well-defined application domains. From their user’s perspective, the language’s modeling primitives must be intuitive and expressive enough in capturing all intended aspects of domain conceptualizations. Over the years formal and explicit representations of domain conceptualizations have been developed as domain ontologies. In this paper, we show how the design of these languages can benefit from conceptual tools developed by the ontology engineering community

Applying MDE tools to defining domain specific languages for model management

In the model driven engineering (MDE), modeling languages play a central role. They range from the most generic languages such as UML, to more individual ones, called domain-specific modeling languages (DSML). These languages are used to create and manage models and must accompany them throughout their life cycle and evolution. In this paper we propose a domain-specific language for model management, to facilitate the user's task, developed with techniques and tools used in the MDE paradigm.Fil: Pérez, Gabriela. Universidad Nacional de la Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; ArgentinaFil: Irazábal, Jerónimo. Universidad Nacional de la Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Pons, Claudia Fabiana. Universidad Nacional de la Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; Argentina. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Gobernación. Comisión de Investigaciones Científicas; ArgentinaFil: Giandini, Roxana Silvia. Universidad Nacional de la Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; Argentin

Automated verification of model transformations based on visual contracts

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10515-012-0102-yModel-Driven Engineering promotes the use of models to conduct the different phases of the software development. In this way, models are transformed between different languages and notations until code is generated for the final application. Hence, the construction of correct Model-to-Model (M2M) transformations becomes a crucial aspect in this approach. Even though many languages and tools have been proposed to build and execute M2M transformations, there is scarce support to specify correctness requirements for such transformations in an implementation-independent way, i.e., irrespective of the actual transformation language used. In this paper we fill this gap by proposing a declarative language for the specification of visual contracts, enabling the verification of transformations defined with any transformation language. The verification is performed by compiling the contracts into QVT to detect disconformities of transformation results with respect to the contracts. As a proof of concept, we also report on a graphical modeling environment for the specification of contracts, and on its use for the verification of transformations in several case studies.This work has been funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under grant P21374-N13, the Spanish Ministry of Science under grants TIN2008-02081 and TIN2011-24139, and the R&D programme of the Madrid Region under project S2009/TIC-1650

Generation of domain-specific language-to-language transformation languages

The increasing complexity of software systems entailed by the imposed requirements and involved stakeholders creates new challenges towards software development and turns it into a complex task. Nowadays, sophisticated development approaches and tools are needed to handle this complexity. Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) provides means to abstract from the details of a software system during the development phase by using models. Domain-Specific Modeling (DSM), a branch of MDE, tackles the complexity by proposing to use modeling languages which are restricted towards the solution space of the targeted problem domain. These Domain-Specific Visual Languages (DSVLs) are used in the DSM approach to create models in the restricted design space making the generation of modeled solutions feasible and providing a basis for the communication between various stakeholders. Since for each of the targeted domains a DSVL is needed, language workbenches emerged which support the development of DSVLs. During the development of a DSVL the semantics of the language has to be defined and, if the DSVL changes, existing models created using the DSVL have to be migrated. Furthermore, models are represented in a specific format hindering the application of, e.g., mature verification methods and tools. To solve these tasks, model transformations are promoted to transform models into different representations conforming to other DSVL. This thesis presents a new kind of model transformation languages, which can be used to handle the arising tasks during the development of DSVLs. These transformation languages are tailored towards the domain of "computational model transformations between DSVLs". The presented transformation languages are based on graph-transformation approaches and simplify the specification of computations by utilizing Plotkin's Strucural Operation Semantics (SOS), and thereby facilitate the definition of computation steps in a declarative way. This approach suffers from the versatility in the scope of DSVLs and thereby requires techniques to reduce the development costs of the transformation languages for different source and target languages. The key to reduce the development costs is the application of the Domain-specific, Full-generation, Service orientation (DFS) approach for the domain of model transformation languages. The application of domain-specifc concept results in graph-based, domain-specific two-level transformation languages. The essence of those languages is captured in a pattern describing possible two-level transformation languages. This pattern is used as the basis for the definition of a generator for those kind of transformation languages making full-generation feasible. The semantics of pattern matching and rewriting rules in the context of graph-based transformations are defined by the utilization of existing graph-transformation tools

Model-driven engineering approach to design and implementation of robot control system

In this paper we apply a model-driven engineering approach to designing domain-specific solutions for robot control system development. We present a case study of the complete process, including identification of the domain meta-model, graphical notation definition and source code generation for subsumption architecture -- a well-known example of robot control architecture. Our goal is to show that both the definition of the robot-control architecture and its supporting tools fits well into the typical workflow of model-driven engineering development.Comment: Presented at DSLRob 2011 (arXiv:cs/1212.3308