A traceability approach for model composition

Model composition is one of the important activities in model driven engineering, because complex systems are built based on several viewpoints. The composition operation is a tedious task, however, traceability not only provides us with the tool to comprehend its effects, but also helps us to better manage the operation itself. This paper suggests a traceability framework for the model composition operation based on aspect oriented modeling and graph transformation. The generated trace models conform to a generic metamodel that allows representing nested trace links. A merge specification case study is presented to illustrate our contribution. © 2013 IEEE.