Semantic Anchoring of Domain Specific Modeling Languages

Опубликовано 6 сентября 2016, 6:29

Model­-based software and system design is based on the end-to-end use of formal, composable and manipulable models in the product life-cycle. Model Integrated Computing (MIC) developed at the Institute for Software Integrated Systems (ISIS) at Vanderbilt University is part of this new direction together with other well known approaches and initiatives, such as Microsoft’s Software Factories, OMG’s Model Driven Architecture (MDA), or IBM’s Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF). An emerging common thread in model-based software and systems design is that modeling languages are domain-­speci?c: they offer software developers concepts and notations that are tailored to capture essential charac­teristics of their application domain. Models represented in Domain­-Speci?c Mod­eling Languages (DSML­-s) express structural and be­havioral aspects of systems that span the design space. Model analysis and model-based code generation require the precise specification of DSMLs. This is partly achieved by metamodeling languages and metamodels describing the abstract syntax (concepts, relationships and wellformedness rules) of DSMLs. While metamodeling and metaprogrammable tools have proved to be quite effective in software and systems engineering, it has become clear that the lack of formally specified semantics of DSML­-s creates potential risk in a wide range of applications. For example, semantic mismatch between DSMLs used for architecture modeling and DSMLs used by safety analysis tools may re­sult in ambiguities in the design flow that are unacceptable. The seminar describes the research program at ISIS to fix this problem by devel­oping an infrastructure for semantic anchoring of DSML-­s. The research program has the following agenda: Development of precise speci?cation for a set of “semantic units” that provides reference semantics of basic behavioral categories and models of computations using the Abstract State Machines framework and the MSR’s AsmL tool suite. Development of a metamodel interface (abstract data model) for the semantic units. Development of an infrastructure for the transforma­tional speci?cation of DSML semantics by defining the mapping between the metamodels of DSML-­s and that of the semantic units. Development of theories, methods and tools for the specification of “derived” semantics by composing semantic units. The research is built on the metaprogrammable MIC tool suite of ISIS developed under DARPA, NSF and industry funding during the past 15 years. Extended Abstract with references are available at the following url: www.isis.vanderbilt.edu/Janos/MSR-Seminar