An Attribute-based Approach to the Analysis of Model Characteristics

Modeling languages provide a powerful technique for describing domainspecific concepts and their relationships. Since the syntactical structure is determined by a meta-model, expressions can be defined on the meta layer and evaluated for arbitrary instances. Currently, meta-modeling standards lack an easy way for defining rules capable of dynamically examining the behavior of a model. In this paper we discuss a new approach that links meta-modeling with wellunderstood methods from the field of compiler construction in order to express semantic constraints and perform data-flow calculations on model instances. We show how our approach can be used to analyze and validate business processes and specify further use cases like e.g. the calculation of model metrics.