Instantiation of meta-models constrained with OCL: A CSP approach

Abstract

The automated generation of models that conform to a given meta-model is an important challenge in Model Driven Engineering, as well for model transformation testing, as for designing and exploring new meta-models. Amongst the main issues, we are mainly concerned by scalability, flexibility and a reasonable computing time. This paper presents an approach for model generation, which relies on Constraint Programming. After the translation of a meta-model into a CSP, our software generates models that conform to this meta-model, using a Constraint Solver. Our model also includes the most frequent types of OCL constraints. Since we are concerned by the relevance of the produced models, we describe a first attempt to improve them. We outperform the existing approaches from the mentioned point of view, and propose a configurable, easy-to-use and free-access tool, together with an on-line demonstrator.