Addressing the Need for Strict Meta-Modeling in Practice - A Case Study of AUTOSAR

Meta-modeling has been a topic of interest in the modeling community for many years, yielding substantialnumber of papers describing its theoretical concepts. Many of them are aiming to solve the problem of traditionalUML based domain-specific meta-modeling related to its non-compliance to the strict meta-modelingprinciple, such as the deep meta-modeling approach. In this paper, we show the practical use of meta-modelsin the automotive development process based on AUTOSAR and visualize places in the AUTOSAR metamodelwhich are broken according to the strict meta-modeling principle. We then explain how the AUTOSARmeta-modeling environment can be re-worked in order to comply to this principle by applying three individualapproaches, each one combined with the concept of Orthogonal Classification Architecture: UML extension,prototypical pattern and deep instantiation. Finally we discuss the applicability of these approaches in practiceand contrast the identified issues with the actual problems faced by the automotive meta-modeling practitioners.Our objective is to bridge the current gap between the theoretical and practical concerns in meta-modeling