Synchronizing Heterogeneous Models in a View-Centric Engineering Approach

When software systems are modelled from different viewpoints using different notations, it is necessary to synchronize these heterogeneous models in order to sustain consistency. To realize this for a specific system, developers need two competences: They have to express the conceptual relationships between the elements of different modelling languages and domains. But they also have to master various techniques of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE), such as transformation languages. Current synchronization approaches, however, do not address these requirements separately and mix technical and conceptual challenges. To ease heterogeneous modelling, we propose a viewcentric engineering approach, in which incremental synchronization transformations are generated from abstract synchronization specifications. This will make it possible to declare mappings and invariants for model concepts with a domain-specific language, for which developers can reuse and customize technical solutions of a generator. In this paper, we introduce the according research goals and questions and sketch our plans for realization and evaluation.