A Lightweight Approach for Domain-Specific Modeling Languages Design

Off-the-shelves general purpose modeling languages cannot obviously cover the whole range of needs that can be encountered in current systems design. Therefore, putting efficiently Model-Driven Engineering into practice involves designing specific modeling languages. The goal is to cover in a more suitable manner a particular application domain (e.g. automotive) or specific concerns (e.g. hardware modeling) or even to focus on a given class of practitioners. In this respect, two design approaches are generally opposed which respectively propose to define domain-specific modeling languages from scratch or to customize an existing general-purpose language. This paper focuses on the latter approach and claims that UML profiles do provide handy and powerful mechanisms to design domain-specific modeling languages but are penalized by lacks of methodological guidelines and tool support. To cope with these lacks, a profile design approach is introduced, which includes a methodological framework to structure profiles design process and tool support to partly automate this process.