An Active Approach to Model Management for Evolving Information Systems

It is desirable to be able to interchange design information between CASE tools. Such interchange facilitates cooperative development, helps in avoiding legacy problems when adopting new tools, and permits the use of different tools for different life-cycle activities. Exchanging model transformation information is particularly demanding in the context of cooperative maintenance of evolving systems. In this paper we suggest an approach using active transformation rules. We show how transformation rules can be expressed using a modest extension of the Object Constraint Language of the UML standard, and actively interpreted. The approach allows existing UML-based tools or repository systems to be readily extended to actively manage models in evolving information systems.