UML model refactoring as refinement: a coalgebraic perspective

Although increasingly popular, Model Driven Architecture (MDA) still lacks suitable formal foundations on top of which rigorous methodologies for the description, analysis and transformation of models could be built. This paper aims to contribute in this direction: building on previous work by the a...

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Detalhes bibliográficos
Autor principal: Barbosa, L. S. (author)
Outros Autores: Meng, Sun (author)
Formato: conferencePaper
Idioma:eng
Publicado em: 2009
Assuntos:
Texto completo:http://hdl.handle.net/1822/20260
País:Portugal
Oai:oai:repositorium.sdum.uminho.pt:1822/20260
Descrição
Resumo:Although increasingly popular, Model Driven Architecture (MDA) still lacks suitable formal foundations on top of which rigorous methodologies for the description, analysis and transformation of models could be built. This paper aims to contribute in this direction: building on previous work by the authors on coalgebraic refinement for software components and architectures, it discusses refactoring of models within a coalgebraic semantic framework. Architectures are defined through aggregation based on a coalgebraic semantics for (subsets of) UML. On the other hand, such aggregations, no matter how large and complex they are, can always be dealt with as coalgebras themselves. This paves the way to a discipline of models’ transformations which, being invariant under either behavioural equivalence or refinement, are able to formally capture a large number of refactoring patterns. The main ideas underlying this research are presented through a detailed example in the context of refactoring of UML class diagrams.