Managing Model Evolution Using the CCBM Approach

With the adoption of MDE, application evolution is facilitated. Instead of modifying each deployed version, the application is modified only once at the model level and then regenerated for each platform. On the other hand, to manage application complexity, models are partitioned and then integrated together to form larger ones. However most of modeling approaches use an integration mechanism based on merging existing models that makes it difficult to manage application evolution in a modular and incremental way. As an alternative, we propose the collaborative component based model approach (CCBM) that leverages software components principles and focuses on the specification of how models collaborate with each other. This paper presents how the proposed approach contributes to integrate and manage change of models incrementally by preserving defined collaborations during the whole life-cycle of an application, from initial, very loosely specified interactions, through step-wise refinements, to the final concretization to a component implementation.