Supporting incremental synchronization in hybrid multi-view modelling

Abstract

Multi-view modelling is a widely accepted technique to reduce the complexity in the development of modern software systems. It allows developers to focus on a narrowed portion of the specification dealing with a selected aspect of the problem. However, multi-view modelling support discloses a number of issues mainly due to consistency management, expressiveness, and customization needs. A possible solution to alleviate those problems is to adopt a hybrid solution for multi-view modelling based on an arbitrary number of custom views defined on top of an underlying modelling language. In this way it is possible to benefit from the consistency by-construction granted by well-formed views while at the same time providing malleable perspectives through which the system under development can be specified. In this respect, this paper presents an approach for supporting synchronization mechanism based on model differences in hybrid multi-view modelling. Model differences allow to focus only on the manipulations operated by the user in a particular view, and to propagate them to the other views in a incremental way thus reducing the overhead of a complete recomputation of modified models. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.