A Component Concept for Typed Graphs with Inheritance and Containment Structures

Model-driven development (MDD) has become a promising trend in software engineering. The model-driven development of highly complex software systems may lead to large models which deserve a modularization concept to enable their structured development in larger teams. Graphs are a natural way to represent the underlying structure of visual models. Typed graphs with inheritance and containment are well suited to describe the essentials of models based on the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF). EMF models already support the physical distribution of model parts. Based on the concept of distributed graphs, we propose typed composite graphs with inheritance and containment to specify logical distribution structures of EMF models. The category-theoretical foundation of this kind of composite graphs forms a solid basis for the precise definition of typed composite graph transformations obeying inheritance and containment conditions.