Viewpoint Co-evolution through Coarse-Grained Changes and Coupled Transformations

Multi-viewpoint modeling is an effective technique to deal with the ever-growing complexity of large-scale systems. The evolution of multi-viewpoint system specifications is currently accomplished in terms of fine-grained atomic changes. Apart from being a very low-level and cumbersome strategy, it is also quite unnatural to system modelers, who think of model evolution in terms of coarse-grained high-level changes. In order to bridge this gap, we propose an approach to formally express and manipulate viewpoint changes in a high-level fashion, by structuring atomic changes into coarse-grained composite ones. These can also be used to formally define reconciling operations to adapt dependent views, using coupled transformations. We introduce a modeling language based on graph transformations and Maude for expressing both, the coarse-grained changes and the coupled transformations that propagate them to reestablish global consistency. We demonstrate the applicability of the approach by its application in the context of RM-ODP.