Model Construction with External Constraints: An Interactive Journey from Semantics to Syntax

Abstract. Mainstream development environments have recently assim-ilated guidance technologies based on constraint satisfaction. We inves-tigate one class of such technologies, namely, interactive guided deriva-tion of models, where the editing system assists a designer by providing hints about valid editing operations that maintain global correctness. We provide a semantics-based classification of such guidance systems and investigate concrete guidance algorithms for two kinds of modeling languages: a simple subset of class-diagram-like language and for feature models. Both algorithms are efficient and provide exhaustive guidance.