Automated Model Synchronization: A Case Study on UML with Maude

Abstract: Design specifications of software-intensive systems involve models that have been defined with different modelling languages for different purposes. Hence, a specification can be seen as the description of a system from multiple viewpoints, each providing domain-specific constructs for modelling the system in a more pre-cise way. Such heterogeneity of models can jeopardize the consistency of the spec-ification, because updates in one viewpoint may cause unpredictable design errors in other viewpoints, which can then be transferred to the implementation. OMG’s Meta-Object Facility enhances the automation of the model consistency manage-ment by providing a uniform format for different modelling languages. In this pa-per, we illustrate a technique, based on rewriting logic and on strategies for finding inconsistencies in MOF-based heterogeneous specifications and for resolving them in an automated way