Towards Constraint-Based Model Types: A Generalised Formal Foundation for Model Genericity

Abstract

With the increasing popularity of model-driven engineering, reusability and compositionality of model-management operations, including model transformations, becomes more important. One way of addressing this problem is through generic typing mechanisms for the parameters and outputs of such operations---essentially, introducing operation-specific views. There are two competing proposals for such type mechanisms available in the literature. However, it is not clear how they compare, whether they are complete or if they are indeed correct. In this paper, I present a generalisation of the notion of a model type. I show how this notion can be used to define a type system for model-management operations and how the two existing proposals for generic model typing (model (sub-) typing and model concepts) can be encoded in the general notion. I believe that this general notion can provide the basis for a systematic study, comparison, and unification of the existing pragmatic proposals.