Property Satisfiability Analysis for Product Lines of Modelling Languages
Esther Guerra, Juan D. Lara, Marsha Chećhik, Rick Salay · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · 2020
Software engineering uses models throughout most phases of the development process. Models are defined using modelling languages. To make these languages applicable to a wider set of scenarios and customizable to specific needs, researchers have proposed using product lines to specify modelling language variants. However, there is currently a lack of efficient techniques for ensuring correctness with respect to properties of the models accepted by a set of language variants. This may prevent detecting problematic combinations of language variants that produce undesired effects at the model level. To attack this problem, we first present a classification of instantiability properties for language product lines. Then, we propose a novel approach to lifting the satisfiability checking of model properties of individual language variants, to the product line level. Finally, we report on an implementation of our proposal in theMerlintool, and demonstrate the efficiency gains of our lifted analysis method compared to an enumerative analysis of each individual language variant.