COPE: A Language for the Coupled Evolution of Metamodels and Models

Domain-specific modeling promises to increase productivity by offering modeling languages tailored to a problem domain. Such modeling languages are typically defined by a metamodel. In consequence of changing requirements and technological progress, the problem domains and thus the metamodels are subject to change. Manually migrating models to a new version of their corresponding metamodel is costly, tedious and error-prone and heavily hampers cost-efficient model-based development in practice. The coupled evolution of a metamodel and its models is a sequence of metamodel changes and their corresponding model migrations. These coupled changes are either metamodelspecific or metamodel-independent. Metamodel-independent changes can be reused to evolve different metamodels and their models which leads to reduction of migration effort. Tool support is necessary in order to benefit from potential reuse. We propose a language that allows for decomposition of a migration into manageable, modular coupled changes. It provides a reuse mechanism for metamodel-independent changes, but is at the same time expressive enough to cater for complex, metamodelspecific changes.