BeMoRe: a Repository for Handling Models Behaviors

Overview & Synopsis

With the increasing size of models and their instances, the management of models in databases becomes a necessity. Persistent Model Management Systems (PMMS) aim at providing a persistent environment for the management of instances, models and metamodels. They consist of (1) a database that stores metamodels, models and their instances, and (2) an associated exploitation language for manipulating these different abstraction layers. Several PMMS have been proposed in the literature but they currently mostly focus on the structural definition of models and metamodels in terms of (meta-)classes and (meta-)attributes. The behavioral semantics that consists of associating operations to models and metamodels elements is currently mostly not supported or only partially supported (by a set of predefined hard coded operations or by imposing a single programming language). In this paper, we propose an extension of PMMS to support the definition of behavioral semantics of models and metamodels using a wide range of programming possibilities. Our approach consists of introducing dynamically user-defined operations that can have multiple and heterogeneous implementations (e.g., external programs or web services). As a consequence, this extension enhances PMMS giving themmore coverage and further flexibility. Our proposal has been implemented in a PMMS called BeMoRe and several experiments have been run to analyze the scalability of this PMMS.