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Scalable model views over heterogeneous modeling technologies and resources

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Abstract

When engineering complex systems, models are typically used to represent various systems aspects. These models are often heterogeneous in terms of modeling languages, provenance, number or scale. As a result, the information actually relevant to engineers is usually split into different kinds of interrelated models. To be useful in practice, these models need to be properly integrated to provide global views over the system. This has to be made possible even when those models are serialized or stored in different formats adapted to their respective nature and scalability needs. Model view approaches have been proposed to tackle this issue. They provide unification mechanisms to combine and query various different models in a transparent way. These views usually target specific engineering tasks such as system design, monitoring and evolution. In an industrial context, there can be many large-scale use cases where model views can be beneficial, in order to trace runtime and design-time data, for example. However, existing model view solutions are generally designed to work on top of one single modeling technology (even though model import/export capabilities are sometimes provided). Moreover, they mostly rely on in-memory constructs and low-level modeling APIs that have not been designed to scale in the context of large models stored in different kinds of data sources. This paper presents a general solution to efficiently support scalable model views over heterogeneous modeling resources possibly handled via different modeling technologies. To this intent, it describes our integration approach between a model view framework and various modeling technologies providing access to multiple types of modeling resources (e.g., in XML/XMI, CSV, databases). It also presents how queries on such model views can be executed efficiently by benefiting from the optimization of the different model technologies and underlying persistence backends. Our solution has been evaluated on a practical large-scale use case provided by the industry-driven European MegaM@Rt2 project that aims at implementing a runtime \(\leftrightarrow \) design time feedback loop. The corresponding EMF-based tooling support, modeling artifacts and reproducible benchmarks are all available online.

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Notes

  1. http://megamart2-ecsel.eu/.

  2. http://megamart2-ecsel.eu/.

  3. The Excel/CSV file stores the same requirement information than the ReqIF model from our initial MODELS 2018 paper but in a different format. For each row/requirement in the CSV file, the various columns contain the values of a requirement’s properties (an identifier and a textual description for each requirement in our current example).

  4. Note that the CSV file has no explicit semantics but a column layout that provides an implicit (pseudo-)semantic model. In such a case, in addition to our knowledge of this format, we can rely on the model representation provided by the Modeling Technology handling this particular resource.

  5. https://github.com/atlanmod/scalable-views-heterogeneous-models.

  6. https://www.atlanmod.org/emfviews.

  7. In past work [12], we provide insights into this weaving model and notably into how it can be created (by using the ViewPoint Description Language) and then internally used within the model view solution (via the Epsilon Comparison Language engine).

  8. https://neoemf.atlanmod.org.

  9. https://www.eclipse.org/epsilon/doc/.

  10. https://github.com/atlanmod/scalable-views-heterogeneous-models.

  11. https://www.eclipse.org/viatra/documentation/addons.html.

  12. https://drill.apache.org/.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IMT Atlantique, LS2N (CNRS) and ARMINES, Nantes, France

    Hugo Bruneliere & Florent Marchand de Kerchove

  2. ICREA and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), Barcelona, Spain

    Gwendal Daniel & Jordi Cabot

  3. University of York, York, UK

    Sina Madani & Dimitris Kolovos

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  1. Hugo Bruneliere
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  2. Florent Marchand de Kerchove
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  3. Gwendal Daniel
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  4. Sina Madani
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  5. Dimitris Kolovos
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  6. Jordi Cabot
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Correspondence to Hugo Bruneliere.

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Communicated by Richard Paige, Andrzej Wasowski, and Oystein Haugen.

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This work has received funding from the ECSEL Joint Undertaking under Grant Agreement No. 737494 (MegaM@Rt2 project). This Joint Undertaking receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program and from Sweden, France, Spain, Italy, Finland & Czech Republic.

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Bruneliere, H., de Kerchove, F.M., Daniel, G. et al. Scalable model views over heterogeneous modeling technologies and resources. Softw Syst Model 19, 827–851 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-020-00794-6

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