Abstract Domain-specific languages allow engineers and domain experts to express problems and design solutions using domain-focused vocabularies and abstractions, by means of graphical or textual syntaxes. In the case of textual syntaxes, language engineers can opt for creating a language-specific syntax by defining and maintaining a BNF-style grammar, or use an existing general-purpose reflective syntax such as the XML Metadata Interchange (XMI) or the Human Usable Textual Notation (HUTN), which do not require any development and maintenance effort, but which are more verbose and cannot be customised. We present Flexmi: a new general-purpose textual syntax for defining models that conform to Eclipse Modelling Framework’s Ecore-based metamodels. Flexmi offers XML and YAML/JSON syntax flavours, it can be fuzzily parsed to reduce verbosity, and it includes a templating system to facilitate encapsulation of reusable composite model element structures, thus enabling more concise model specifications. We have evaluated Flexmi for verbosity and model loading performance against XMI, HUTN, and a bespoke (i.e. custom) textual syntax for Ecore (Emfatic). Our results indicate that the use of fuzzy parsing and templates allow Flexmi to achieve a significant reduction in the verbosity of models compared to XMI/HUTN and can become almost as concise as a bespoke textual syntax, with a moderate performance penalty.

Abstract Conflicts in software artefacts can appear during collaborative development through version control systems. When these conflicts happen in XMI models, the conflict sections generated by diff programs break the XMI serialisation and compromise the ability to use model editors that assume well-formedness of this serialisation. While these conflict sections already mark the conflicting lines of the model, current tools for conflict resolution in models ignore them and instead load the different versions of a model from the repository, over which they perform a full and costly comparison that re-identifies the conflicts. We present a novel approach that prevents this repetition of work by directly parsing XMI-based models with conflict sections, which allows for a targeted analysis of only the lines of the model that have been detected to be in conflict by the version control system. We have implemented this approach in the Peacemaker tool, which can load XMI models with conflict sections, compute and display conflicts at the model level, and provide appropriate resolution actions. Compared with state-of-the-art model comparison tools with support for conflict resolution, Peacemaker is able to identify the vast majority of conflicts in models while reducing the required time by up to 60%. The small subset of non-identified conflicts does not introduce issues into the models, e.g. there is no loss of model information, and the resulting models after line-merging these conflicts conform to their metamodels.

Rolls-Royce Control Systems supplies engine control and monitoring systems for aviation applications, and is required to design, certify, and deliver these to the highest level of safety assurance. To allow Rolls-Royce to develop safe and robust systems, which continue to increase in complexity, model-based techniques are now a critical part of the software development process. In this paper, we discuss the experiences, challenges and lessons learnt when developing a bespoke domain-specific modelling workbench based on open-source modelling technologies including the Eclipse Modelling Framework (EMF), Xtext, Sirius and Epsilon. This modelling workbench will be used to architect and integrate the software for all future Rolls-Royce engine control and monitoring systems.

Producing graphical views from software and system models is often desirable for communication and comprehension purposes, even when graphical model editing capabilities are not required - because the preferred editable concrete syntax of the models is text-based, or for models extracted via reverse engineering. To support such scenarios, we present a novel approach for efficient rule-based generation of transient graphical views from models using lazy model-to-text transformation, and an implementation of the proposed approach in the form of an open-source Eclipse plugin named Picro. PiCTO builds on top of mature visualisation software such as Graphviz and PlantUML and supports, among others, composite views, layers, and multi-model visualisation. We illustrate how Picto can be used to produce various forms of graphical views such as node-edge diagrams, tables and sequence-like diagrams, and we demonstrate the efficiency benefits of lazy view generation approach against batch model-to-text transformation for generating views from large models.