Summary of research project:

Visual modelling languages play an essential role in understanding and constructing systems, both hardware and software systems in Computing Science as well as other types of systems, such as production systems. In model-driven software development, models even become the central artefacts of software development. Depending on the purpose of the modelling, different modelling languages, general and domain-specific as well as visual and textual, are required. In this project, we consider two complementary approaches to defining visual modelling languages: Metamodelling and graph grammars. While metamodelling represents a declarative language design, graph grammars define a language in a constructive way. In order to better utilise the advantages of these two paradigms, we want to integrate them appropriately. Metamodels are to be translated into equivalent model grammars that enable a well-founded automatic generation of instance models. The formal basis is the theory of algebraic graph transformation. We want to use this metamodel translation to develop user-friendly model editors on the one hand and to systematically test model transformations on the other. The new methods will be implemented on the basis of the Eclipse modelling project and evaluated on two reference applications.