A Formal Approach to Model Composition Applied to VUML

Several approaches adopted by the software engineering community rely on the principle of multi-modeling which allows to separate concerns and to model a system as a set of less complex sub-models. Model composition is a crucial activity in Model Driven Engineering (MDE). It is particularly useful when adopting a multi-modeling approach to analyze and design software systems. In previous work, we have defined a view-based UML profile called VUML. In this paper, we describe a formal approach for model composition in which we consider the composition as an algebraic operator on the set of UML-compliant models. We specify the semantics of our composition operator by means of graph transformations. Furthermore, we present a composition scheme interpreted by a two-steps composition process based on two strategies of correspondence and merging. To illustrate our approach, we apply it to the composition of UML class models diagrams into one VUML model class diagram.