Visual Design of Software Architecture and Evolution based on Graph Transformation

AbstractThe paper suggests a two-level approach to describe visually software architectures and their evolution. One visual modeling formalism is used to describe the architecture level while another is used to model the behavior of each component (component specification level). Graph transformation is applied for both levels to describe the modeling formalisms and the model evolution in a formal way. The graph transformation based visual modeling approach GenGEd allows the designer to define the concrete and abstract syntax of each formalism. Thus, the choice of the visual formalisms is not restricted to existing ADLs or modeling languages but new visual languages can be defined by the user according to the problem domain. The architecture and component specifications are related over their abstract syntax. Here, it is possible to enforce coherence between the two levels while the user is changing the model in the editor generated by the GenGEd tool. The ideas are illustrated by a small example using UML-like class diagrams for the architecture and Petri net like networks for the component behavior