Modular multilevel metamodeling with metaMod

Abstract

The increase of software driven functionalities in products leads to more complex software. Helping with the construction of this complex software, models in model-driven engineering have become larger and more complex. As a consequence, the models are harder to understand and the need to reuse models is augmented. Given these two goals: increasing understandability and reuse of models, and inspired by modular programming in the realm of general software development and its role in fulfilling these goals (among others), we set to explore modularity mechanisms for models. Although work has been done to address the issue of modularity in models, there is no commonly agreed method for doing it. Ours is an attempt to discover the basic modularity elements for models. We have done this in the context of a simple multilevel metamodeling language that we designed, MetaMod, where we introduced a few modularity mechanisms: groups, fragment abstractions and applications. To test the feasibility of our ideas, we created a prototype of this language and a few exploratory examples in the language