Integrating the Designer in-the-loop for Metamodel/Model Co-Evolution via Interactive Computational Search

Metamodels evolve even more frequently than programming languages. This evolution process may result in a large number of instance models that are no longer conforming to the revised meta-model. On the one hand, the manual adaptation of models after the metamodels' evolution can be tedious, error-prone, and time-consuming. On the other hand, the automated co-evolution of metamodels/models is challenging especially when new semantics is introduced to the metamodels. In this paper, we propose an interactive multi-objective approach that dynamically adapts and interactively suggests edit operations to developers and takes their feedback into consideration. Our approach uses NSGA-II to find a set of good edit operation sequences that minimizes the number of conformance errors, maximizes the similarity with the initial model (reduce the loss of information) and minimizes the number of proposed edit operations. The designer can approve, modify, or reject each of the recommended edit operations, and this feedback is then used to update the proposed rankings of recommended edit operations. We evaluated our approach on a set of metamodel/model coevolution case studies and compared it to fully automated coevolution techniques.