MPM Workshop

• Contact Person: Hans Vangheluwe

Agenda

• Talk by Juan de Lara (UaM, Spain) "Flexible Model-Driven Engineering through Deep Meta-modelling and Genericity"
• Talk by Dennis Wagelaar (VUB) "Towards a general composition semantics for rule-based model transformations"
• Talk by Tom Mens and Romuald Deshayes (UMons) "Modeling the interactive behaviour of 3D objects"

Flexible Model-Driven Engineering through Deep Meta-modelling and Genericity

Juan de Lara

Meta-modelling is at the core of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE), where it is used for language engineering and domain modelling.  The OMG's Meta-Object Facility is the standard framework for building and instantiating meta-models. However, in the last few years, several researchers have identified limitations and rigidities in such a scheme, most notably concerning the consideration of only two meta-modelling levels at the same time, and its little support for abstraction, modularity, reusability and extendibility of (meta-)models, behaviours and transformations. In this latter respect, MDE is inherently type-centric, as model manipulations are specified over the types of concrete meta-models, and cannot be reused for other meta-models, even if these share characteristics.

In order to alleviate this weakness, we will present two techniques. In the first part of the talk, we will introduce a framework that supports a dual linguistic/ontological instantiation and permits building systems with an arbitrary number of meta-levels through so called potency. In the second part, we will introduce some elements of generic programming into meta-modelling, to achieve reusability of models, meta-models and transformations. In particular, we will use concepts, templates and mixin layers. Concepts gather requirements that meta-models need to  fulfil in orther to execute a certain model operation. Hence, operations are defined over concepts, which are later bound to concrete meta-models, becoming reusable. Templates use concepts to express requirements on their generic parameters, and are applicable to models and meta-models. Finally, we define functional layers by means of meta-model mixins which can extend other meta-models.

We will also introduce a meta-modelling tool, called MetaDepth, which implements these ideas.

Bibliography:
[1] "From Types to Type Requirements: Genericity for Model-Driven Engineering". Juan de Lara, Esther Guerra. Software and Systems Modeling (Springer). 2011. In press (selected papers from MODELS'10).
[2] "Deep meta-modelling with MetaDepth". 2010 Juan de Lara and Esther Guerra. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 6141.pp.: 1--20. Proc. TOOLS Europe 2010: 48th International Conference on Objects, Models, Components, Patterns.

Towards a general composition semantics for rule-based model transformation

Dennis Wagelaar

As model transformations have become an integral part of the automated software engineering lifecycle, reuse, modularisation, and composition of model transformations becomes important. One way to compose model transformations is to compose modules of transformation rules, and execute the composition as one transformation (internal composition). This kind of composition can provide fine-grained semantics, as it is part of the transformation language. This paper aims to generalise two internal composition mechanisms for rule-based transformation languages, module import and rule inheritance, by providing executable semantics for the composition mechanisms within a virtual machine. The generality of the virtual machine is demonstrated for different rule-based transformation languages by compiling those languages to, and executing them on this virtual machine. We will discuss how ATL and graph transformations can be mapped to modules and rules inside the virtual machine.

Modeling the interactive behaviour of 3D objects

Tom Mens and Romuald Deshayes

To goal of this short presentation is to discuss the research challenges of specifying the behaviour of interacting with 3D models. Typical usage scenarios are augmented reality, gaming, domotics and robotics. The research domain of user interface modeling aims to study new modeling languages that facilitate the specification of the interaction between the user and a software application in the most appropriate way. Little research exists, however, that tries to combine models that specify the behaviour of 3D objects and their interaction with each other and with the end-user. From the user interface point of view, the challenge is to come up with domain-specific modeling languages that go beyond the traditional WIMP-style of interaction, and that offer a more immersive and intuitive user experience. From the 3D modeling point of view, the challenge is to come up with modeling languages that combine the often continuous behaviour of 3D objects (e.g. through differen