Detail

Collaborative modeling: multi-view modeling, generation of domain-specific interactive editors. Applied in AToMPM

The development of complex software-intensive systems requires stakeholders from diverse domains to work in a coordinated manner on different aspects of the system. Model-driven engineering (MDE) helps in reducing the gap between heterogeneous domains using principles of separation of concerns, automatic generation and domain-specific languages (DSL). MDE is thus a potential solution to help develop systems collaboratively. In MDE, stakeholders work on models in order to design, transform, simulate, and analyze systems. Teams of stakeholders with varying expertise work together to produce a coherent and complete system. Therefore, there is a need for collaborative platforms to allow modelers to work together.

In this talk, I present a set of necessary requirements that must be addressed in a framework that enables collaborative modeling. We will see how multi-view modeling is essential to let users work on different aspects of the system concurrently. Having users from different domains and expertise, the framework should be able to adapt its environment specifically to the needs and habits of the user.

The framework should fundamentally support different paradigms expressed as DSLs, which brings the issue of integrating different languages. We will focus on extending how model editors are generated in MDE with the user experience concern, namely the interaction with the domain-specific editor. Then, I present how the cloud-based multi-user tool AToMPM addresses some of the challenges for building a collaborative platform for modeling. I review what implementation decisions were needed to satisfy the above-mentioned requirements.