A graphical specification of model composition with triple graph grammars

The concept of model is widely used in the MDE approach in order to represent several software artifacts, which are handled by different development teams throughout the software life cycle. Management of these models requires the definition of a set of model management operators such as the composition operation. This is generally an operation, which is dedicated to merge a number of models in order to create one (or more) incorporated model and which depends on the application context. The current work focuses on the description of a formal approach for model composition where the composition is specified by a set of graph transformation rules over UML-compliant models. The semantics of our composition operator is defined using triple graph grammars (TGGs) formalism. Furthermore, we present a composition scheme interpreted by a three-steps composition process: matching, checking and merging. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.