Applying MDE tools at runtime: Experiments upon runtime models

Runtime models facilitate the management of running systems in many different ways. One of the advantages of runtime models is that they enable the use of existing MDE tools at runtime to implement common auxiliary activities in runtime management, such as querying, visualization, and transformation. In this tool demonstration paper, we focus on this specific aspect of runtime models. We discuss the requirements of runtime models to enable the use of model-driven tools, and present our tool to help provide such runtime models on the target systems. We apply this tool on a wide range of target systems, modeling the Android mobile system, the Eclipse GUI, the Java class structure, and the JOnAS inner structure. With the help of these runtime models, we perform the runtime management on these systems using classical MDE tools including OCL, QVT, and GMF.EI