Heterogenous Coupled Evolution

July 11, 2008

The paper “Heterogenous Coupled Evolution” by Sander Vermolen and Eelco Visser has been accepted for presentation at the conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS 2008) to be held in Toulouse, France at the end of September 2008.

Abstract: As most software artifacts, meta-models can evolve. Their evolution requires conforming models to co-evolve along with them. Coupled evolution supports this. Its applicability is not limited to the modeling domain. Other domains are for example evolving grammars or database schema. Existing approaches to coupled evolution focus on a single, homogeneous domain. They solve the co-evolution problems locally and repeatedly. In this paper we will present a systematic, heterogeneous approach to coupled evolution. It provides an automatically derived domain specific transformation language; a means of executing transformations at the top level; a derivation of the coupled bottom level transformation; and the ability to generically abstract from elementary transformations. The feasibility of the architecture is evaluated by applying it to data model evolution as well as grammar evolution.