Automated Metamodel/Model Co-Evolution: A Search-Based Approach

Metamodels evolve over time to accommodate new features, improve existing designs, and fix errors identified in previous releases. One of the obstacles that may limit the adaptation of new metamodels by developers is the extensive manual changes that have been applied to migrate existing models. Recent studies addressed the problem of automating the metamodel/model co-evolution based on manually defined migration rules. The definition of these rules requires the list of changes at the metamodel level which are difficult to fully identify. Furthermore, different possible alternatives may be available to translate a metamodel change to a model change. Thus, it is hard to generalize these co-evolution rules.