Contextual hyperedge replacement

Abstract

In model-driven design, the structure of software is commonly specified by meta-models like uml class diagrams. In this paper we study how graph grammars can be used for this purpose, using statecharts as an example. We extend context-free hyperedge-replacement-which is not powerful enough for this application-so that rules may not only access the nodes attached to the variable on their left-hand side, but also nodes elsewhere in the graph. Although the resulting notion of contextual hyperedge replacement preserves many properties of the context-free case, it has considerably more generative power-enough to specify software models that cannot be specified by class diagrams. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.