Formally defining and iterating infinite models

Abstract

The wide adoption of MDE raises new situations where we need to manipulate very large models or even infinite model streams gathered at runtime (e.g., monitoring). These new uses cases for MDE raise challenges that had been unforeseen by the time standard modeling framework were designed. This paper proposes a formal definition of an infinite model, as well as a formal framework to reason on queries over infinite models. This formal query definition aims at supporting the design and verification of operations that manipulate infinite models. First, we precisely identify the MOF parts which must be refined to support infinite structure. Then, we provide a formal coinductive definition dealing with unbounded and potentially infinite graph-based structure. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.