Extending Visual Modeling Languages with Timed Behavior Specifications
José Eduardo Rivera, Cristina Vicente-Chicote, Antonio Vallecillo · International Database Engineering and Applications Symposium · 2009
Domain specific languages (DSLs) play a cornerstone role in Model-Driven Software Development for representing models and metamodels. DSLs are usually defined only in terms of their abstract and concrete syntaxes, although this hampers the development of formal analysis and simulation tools. In this paper we advocate the use of in-place model transformations to complement metamodels (the structural aspects of a DSL) with timed behavioral specifications. In particular, we propose an extension for in-place transformation rules to state action properties (not only model element properties), and to model time-dependent behavior. This approach avoids making unnatural changes to the DSL metamodels to represent behavioral and time aspects, and allows the resulting specifications to be translated into different semantic domains, such as Real-Time Maude, making them amenable to simulation and other kinds