Concept-Driven Engineering for Supporting Different Views of Models

This paper investigates the the development and evolution of concepts and the management of transformers, which adds semantics to the concepts. We illustrate how concepts, their variants and transformers can be developed via cooperation. In order to meet increasing user demands for more various software systems, we are revising the software developing process to accommodate mass customisation based upon Concept-Driven Engineering (CDE). CDE is a strategy to application specification and generation of new concepts via transformers. The concept and its transformation rather than the implementation is central to the development process. It allows automation for specification from early stages to executable specification and code generation. CDE continue to be a challenges in building complex software systems that have several variations and options. Software development is based upon a lot of specifications and implementations such as feature models, UML models and code, which are in different formats but share a certain amount of information. CDE is similar to the ideas of Model Driven Engineering (MDE) and Software Product Line Engineering, whereby we use the term concept instead model. A concept can be a model or a specification and is defined on a concept structure and a set of transformers. Concepts are assigned to a set of transformers, which generates new concepts. In this sense also a software system is a concept. One main remark is the management of the evolution of concepts and its transformers. Concept-Driven Engineering supports that requirements of the software do not remain constant during its development time and therefore the specification has to evolved and refined in order to fulfil the new requirements. One remark should lie an the management of the transformers that can be effectively be used on specifications. Against MDE CDE focus on the transformers which carry out the semantics of the specification, resp. the model. It is needful to study how transformers will affect the development process, that means how easy is a transformer to use, resp. to reuse. CDE abilities rely on the detailed transformer designer’s knowledge of concept structure and development work flow while considering software system knowledge, software engineering techniques and methods. The aim of CDE is to avoid the development concepts and transformers which are in downstream development incapable to use. When developers change one concept simultaneously, we need to propagate these changes across all concepts to guarantee them consistent. The process of synchronization propagates changes among specifications in different stages to all involved participants. Exchange of models between local platforms is still a challenging issue. The exchange and