Systematic Co-Evolution of OCL Expressions

Metamodels are the central artifacts in Model-Driven Engineering and like any other software artifact, subject to constant change. This fact necessitates the co-evolution of dependent artifacts such as models and transformations to resolve induced inconsistencies. While the co-evolution of models has been extensively studied, the co-evolution of transformations and especially OCL expressions being a substantial part thereof have been less examined up to now. To fill this gap, this paper proposes resolution actions for all atomic metamodel changes violating the syntactical correctness of OCL expressions, thus, being able to resolve induced inconsistencies. Thereby, the resolution actions establish a virtual view on the evolved metamodel such that syntactical correctness is re-established. To verify the semantical correctness of the resolution actions, we use our PaMoMo language, allowing to specify semantical correctness requirements for model transformations. Finally, to demonstrate the applicability of our approach, a proof-of-concept prototype on basis of ATL is provided.