Improving reusability of dynamic meta modeling specifications with rule overriding

Dynamic meta modeling (DMM) is a visual semantics specification technique targeted at languages equipped with a metamodel. In DMM, the metamodel of a language is mapped into a runtime metamodel able to express runtime states of instances of that language. In addition, graph transformation rules are defined which describe how these runtime states change in time. Given an instance of the runtime metamodel and a set of rules typed over that metamodel, a transition system can be computed which represents the semantics of the model instance under investigation. To be easily understandable by language engineers, DMM resembles a couple of well-known object-oriented concepts. Part of this is the fact that a DMM rule has many similarities to a method in an object-oriented language. In this paper, we enhance DMM such that DMM rules can "override" other DMM rules, similar to a method being overridden in a subclass. We argue that this does not only have positive impact on reusability of DMM specifications, but also improves the intuitive understandability of DMM rules.