Trace comprehension operators for executable DSLs

Abstract

Recent approaches contribute facilities to breathe life into metamodels, thus making behavioral models directly executable. Such facilities are particularly helpful to better utilize a model over the time dimension, e.g., for early validation and verification. However, when even a small change is made to the model, to the language definition (e.g., semantic variation points), or to the external stimuli of an execution scenario, it remains difficult for a designer to grasp the impact of such a change on the resulting execution trace. This prevents accessible trade-off analysis and design-space exploration on behavioral models. In this paper, we propose a set of formally defined operators for analyzing execution traces. The operators include dynamic trace filtering, trace comparison with diff computation and visualization, and graph-based view extraction to analyze cycles. The operators are applied and validated on a demonstrative example that highlight their usefulness for the comprehension specific aspects of the underlying traces.