Composite Modeling based on Distributed Graph Transformation and the Eclipse Modeling Framework

Model-driven development (MDD) has become a promising trend in software engineering for a number of reasons. Models as the key artifacts help the developers to abstract from irrelevant details, focus on important aspects of the underlying domain, and thus master complexity. As software systems grow, models may grow as well and finally become possibly too large to be developed and maintained in a comprehensible way. In traditional software development, the complexity of software systems is tackled by dividing the system into smaller cohesive parts, so-called components, and let distributed teams work on each concurrently. The question arises how this strategy can be applied to model-driven development. The overall aim of this thesis is to develop a formalized modularization concept to enable the structured and largely independent development of interrelated models in larger teams. To this end, this thesis proposes component models with explicit export and import interfaces where exports declare what is provided while imports declare what it needed. Then, composite model can be connected by connecting their compatible export and import interfaces yielding so-called composite models. Suitable to composite models, a transformation approach is developed which allows to describe changes over the whole composition structure. From the practical point of view, this concept especially targets models based on the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF). In the modeling community, EMF has evolved to a very popular framework which provides modeling and code generation facilities for Java applications based on structured data models. Since graphs are a natural way to represent the underlying structure of visual models, the formalization is based on graph transformation. Incorporated concepts according to distribution heavily rely on distributed graph transformation introduced by Taentzer. Typed graphs with inheritance and containment structures are well suited to describe the essentials of EMF models. However, they also induce a number of constraints like acyclic inheritance and containment which have to be taken into account. The category-theoretical foundation in this thesis allows for the precise definition of consistent composite graph transformations satisfying all inheritance and containment conditions. The composite modeling approach is shown to be coherent with the development of tool support for composite EMF models and composite EMF model transformation