Difference-based Conformance Checking for Ecore Metamodels

Abstract

During modern model-driven development processes, generators and higherorder transformations are used to create metamodels with short life cycles. Since these metamodels often differ from each other only in small parts, instances as well as metamodels may be re-used if the difference between them does not lead to a violation of instance conformance. Existing co-evolution approaches describe this conformance based on change operators to a metamodel. Thus, they require that changes to the metamodels are carried out using special editors. To use this conformance for arbitrarily generated metamodels, we present a conformance validator for Ecore metamodels that is based on difference-based analysis. The validator has been implemented as a plug-in for the Eclipse framework. We demonstrate the completeness of our approach by covering state-of-the-art co-evolution change operators.